


FAIR PLAY

by roughmagic



Series: A SINCERE EFFORT [7]
Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Alternate Universe, Biological Warfare, Bosscelot in background, Brainwashing, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Death, Child Soldiers, Complete, Gaslighting, Kid Psycho Mantis, M/M, Medical Horror, Nuclear Weapons, Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Second Person, Post-Kingdom of the Flies, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pseudoscience, Psychic Abilities, Spoilers, War Crimes, implied vkaz
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2020-02-25
Packaged: 2020-06-24 04:24:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 32,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19716160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roughmagic/pseuds/roughmagic
Summary: “They captured Venom, and Eli. Sahelanthropus is still on the island, along with what looks like a XOF skeleton crew. There’s only been one outgoing transport from there since, and we’re betting that was the Boss.”“From what we can determine of their flight path, they’re extraditing him to one of Cipher’s little hideouts. Eagle and Civet, you’ll be retrieving the Boss. Moth and Lion will be finishing his work with Sahelanthropus.”





	1. MOTH

**Author's Note:**

> The next major installment of Sincere Effort-- and, fair warning, it isn't fully complete. Tags are subject to update and change, edits might happen, things are in flux.

**MOTH**

**IF YOU HAD BEHAVED NICELY THE COMMUNISTS WOULDN'T EXIST**

The first rifle shot snaps out across a space open to the sky and air, but even choked by distance and the bad recording coming through the headphones, you can tell something went wrong. There’s no sound of ricochet or contact.

The momentary silence afterwards is layered with the same static and falling water as it had been for most of the mission, the Boss’s breathing through the gas mask close enough for your ear to be pressed to his chest.

In the embarrassed space after what had to be a missed shot, automatic gunfire chews up the slack from multiple points in the landscape. The way the sound reaches the Boss tells you that much. There’s shouting, too, as the gunfire lapses, and you figure it must be contextual directions muffled by masks. The launch of a surface to air missile, the explosion so quickly afterwards that they must’ve been firing at something almost point blank. Two more missiles in rapid succession from farther points, silence. The Boss’s breathing. You can imagine what his heartbeat is like from the pace of it, not hammering but not sluggish. Steady and present.

Then machinery, and you clap the headphones to your ears as if you could push inside the noise to take you there, to push you back to that moment. The blueprints and specs Ocelot had funneled down you before you’d made it into the chopper tell you that it could roar. An intimidation tactic. You hunch farther over on the bench.

Hearing it and not seeing it makes it worse, leaves you to imagine the shape of the thing in motion. Machinegun fire, a terrible moan, the first footsteps as it rises. You should be able to feel it in the small space between your ribs, the ground underneath you should shake with it. There’s the toneless white volume of fire spreading quickly, responses following, first at a distance and then much closer. Not the Boss, though. The wordless, constant exhale screaming around him should bother you more than it does.

A human voice seems more alien than the sounds of battle, just a kid in a loudspeaker. A snotty British schoolboy in a death machine. _“I knew you’d be through here.”_ Had you ever heard him speak? 

_“You’re not a kid anymore. You can call your own shots.”_ Your Boss, calm under pressure. That kind of reasoning tone you can remember him holding like an open hand to you. To Civet. _“But at this rate you’ll be dead before you have a chance."_

_“I’m free to die however I wish. Yes…_ free _.”_

The recording skips, editing time and space. It drops you back down into small-arms fire, the Boss’s labored breathing and then a wash of static from an explosion. Your past wants to supply the high-pitched whine of temporary deafness, but you hear the boots approaching just fine. Maybe the Boss doesn’t. There’s an American accent that makes you more anxious than Russian or Afrikaans does anymore.

_“On the ground! On the ground! Put your fucking hands up!”_

_“That’s—”_

_“Get the kid! Get the kid!”_

There’s distortion after that, before the iDroid recording goes quiet. The light of an imagined fire fades away, leaving you in the dark space inside your body armor, between your headphones, behind eyelids. The whine and ambient thrumming of the helicopter is the layer underneath your own body’s rushing tide. Not fast, not slow. Present.

You pull off the headphones, returning to see Lion watching you. Not with any great interest. She looks statuary in the red auxiliary lights of the chopper, deft shelves of red and black.

“Do you want to listen to it?” You offer her the whole iDroid plus headphones, since it’s already queued up on yours. “It’s just jungle noises for an hour before anything starts. I can run it back, if you want.”

Lion holds out her hand for the iDroid, letting you place it on her palm. “Jungle noise is fine.”

You watch her ease on the headphones, leaning in once to help her with the iDroid controls to start the recording from the beginning. She settles down, hanging onto the front of her own flak vest like a shell, eyes open and gaze straight ahead.

It leaves you in silence quilted with noise, not true quiet with the helicopter around you. Jeroboam nervously swallowing and rustling around in his pockets for more bubblegum. It’s a while until you’ll be in range, and you imagine him putting an entire pack’s worth of too-sweet breath into the closed space you share with him until you reach the island.

You hadn’t felt one way or another about the late-night summons, but it was a relief to see Civet there in the briefing room. If it was a delayed disciplinary hearing for your conjoined crimes it wouldn’t have surprised you, but the presence of the other two convinced you otherwise. Eagle and Lion. Civet had brought them up as overheard references and you’d seen the deliberately unremarkable staff files.

The XOs had kept you waiting, the four of you standing mostly at attention in the debrief room, studiously not staring at each other. Eagle is an average built man who looks like a dog-eared book page in every way that matters. Some kind of all-American white bread kid grown up and pared back down to the essentials. Lion is a sadly beautiful woman from somewhere in the Middle East or Spain with the distant bearing and body of a queen from antiquity, as weighted and curvy as Eagle is lanky. Nobody is trying to talk to anybody, not even Civet. Nobody says anything until the XOs show up, tell you someone’s stolen your Boss.

“The XOF presence was stronger than anticipated,” Ocelot’s saying, jabbing a finger at a splotch of green inside a bigger blue field. It’s an island on a lake, or something. The projected topography is painted over him in indistinct bands of color. “So Pequod was out of range when the Boss infiltrated, using the wormhole system.”

“The _what,_ now _?_ ” Eagle’s voice with its Midwestern upticks isn’t familiar yet, and you resist the urge to look at him, forcing yourself to focus on Ocelot.

“We’ll come back to that.” The little twist of the Major’s mouth like he’s annoyed at the interruption, but not enough to stop. “The plan was for him to go in quietly, extract Sahelanthropus before XOF could, and then regroup with additional Diamond Dog forces to sterilize the island.”

“So much for that.” Kaz spits, bitterly. You aren’t looking, but you can see cords of muscle standing out on his neck, like it’s taking all his strength to keep still. “They captured Venom, and Eli. Sahelanthropus is still on the island, along with what looks like a XOF skeleton crew. There’s only been one outgoing transport from there since, and we’re betting that was the Boss.”

Ocelot clicks the remote for the next slide, the same map but with a new overlay. The ant crawl around in the island is in red, marking the path the Boss had taken. “From what we can determine of their flight path, they’re extraditing him to one of Cipher’s little hideouts. Eagle and Civet, you’ll be retrieving the Boss. Moth and Lion will be finishing his work with Sahelanthropus.”

“You’ll both have full access to Support teams from here on Mother Base, but in the interest of keeping the lines clear, I’ll be Eagle and Civet’s point of contact.” Kaz is movement in your periphery, shifting of weight in the darkness. Angry, but with the volume excised. “The other team gets Ocelot.”

The other team. Why didn’t he say Moth and Lion? You want to bite the inside of your mouth for noticing.

It makes no sense to cross pollinate the teams with details of the others’ mission, and you don’t want it anyway. The less you can worry about Civet, the better. You and Lion stand side by side in the next, smaller room, no windows. There’s another projector, but the room is even darker than before it washes out with another projection.

The map of the island is fairly detailed along the route the Boss took, Intel patching in what they’d had for him and filling in spots with what he ran into. You try to imagine him following that route he’d taken, from the beach up and into the jungle. Ocelot’s breakdown of this is cursory—he doesn’t expect the terrain to pose a problem.

The next slide is something under a microscope, like an aimlessly-growing crab or a Joshua tree. Ocelot’s tone changes from tour guide to the Major’s, and you let yourself be tugged to attention, anchored from somewhere free floating.

“It’s a breeding ground for the English strain of the vocal parasites—that’s why it took XOF as long as it did to move in. But they’ll be adjusted now, no doubt. Plenty of live and dead tissue samples they’ll want to take.” Back to the map, a grainy photo of containers and tents. A truck or two.

“This means you absolutely do not, under any circumstances, breathe the air. Gas masks at all times, and you’ll go through a sterilization process as soon as you’re back on base. Don’t get injured, don’t ingest anything, don’t splash around in any bodily fluids.”

You can hear Civet saying something like, _Vacation plans ruined, huh, sir._ You don’t know what Lion is thinking. An unkind instinct tells you she isn’t thinking anything at all. 

“Infection means you don’t leave the island.” Ocelot looks at you, face washed in green jungle map. His eyes are very bright, pupils just pinpricks. He’s putting weight on this, although you’d known in your heart since he’d said _sterilization_ that infection meant death, sooner or later. You wouldn’t want to track the vocal cord parasites back to base anyway. 

It’s impossible not to wonder if you’re getting this assignment because you’ve run your course. They shoot horses, don’t they?

“Your job will be infiltrating the XOF encampment, reclaiming Sahelanthropus, and retrieving Eli and the Mbele kids if they’re still on the island. That was the Boss’s original mission, and we aren’t going to leave it by the wayside.” He pauses, less for effect and more to judge if the two of you are present and accounted for. “Questions?”

Lion doesn’t give you the impression she’ll speak up, so you do it. “How are we moving Sahelanthropus off the island, sir?”

“We’ll supply you with cargo grade Fultons if the wormhole system is having trouble with it. Intel says it’s been dismembered, so you should be able to retrieve it in chunks.”

“And for the children, sir?”

“You’ll be using the wormhole system to Fulton them home, as well as deploying to the island.” Ocelot lifts a hand briefly—it’s theatrics, since neither of you were going to try and talk over him anyway. “It’s experimental tech, but if it’s good enough for the Boss, it’s good enough for you.”

The wisdom of sending you and Lion the same way the Boss had gone seems shaky, if he’d gotten captured. Wouldn’t they be expecting that? It doesn’t really matter, in the long run.

Lion’s already dragged two chairs into the room and is rolling up her sleeve by the time you come back down to earth—Ocelot’s got his syringes out and a lamp that you’ve seen before, a long time ago. They’re items out of an old, recurring dream, nothing you thought could truly exist in this world. Certainly not in conjunction with your own reality.

But he sets up the lamp and presses something cold into your veins and loads the projector with a mess of technical drawings and unfamiliar handwriting. With great effort, you can turn to see Lion watching, stone still and facing ahead. I would like, Ocelot announces, to tell you about Sahelanthropus.

Civet describes losing time as standing in one point and looking up to find yourself in another with no idea how long it took to move between the two. Or not move. It’s jarring and exhausting, but it’s not nearly as distracting as how much you _know_ when you surface. Everything about this technological terror. Every diagram and spec sheet and redacted operation manual.

The knowledge turns to tinder suspended inside you, ready to ignite and burn in a flash. Will you remember the railgun specs in a year from now? Five? You’ll know it if you need it tonight, or today, or whatever time it is when you’re there. You have it all, holding it all tightly down and in place as if it could suddenly spill out or slip through your fingers. 

Bloated with blueprints. If you vomited, you think, it would be machine oil. Beside you, Lion hangs forward in her chair, hair curtaining her face. One hand has fallen off her lap and hangs empty and limp beside her, and you struggle to make yourself reach for her. You’re too far by any measurement, but you have to try. Have to get used to trying. She’s your partner now. _Oh, so it’s that easy? We had to trade blood to be friends but you’re just okay with Lion right off the bat._ It’s not like that, Civet.

Ocelot is white surf and a red tide rushing up, blotting out Lion. You can hear his spurs on either side of your chair, and his fingers are like prongs in your face, propping you up to look at him. He could sit on your lap if he wanted. “You’ve got a habit of knowing things you aren’t supposed to, Moth. What do you know about Eli?" 

Just what was in the tapes. Nobody’s put it down on paper yet, to your knowledge. “Doesn’t share genes… with the Boss.” The words kind of slop out of your mouth. “But, Snake, m—”

“Did Miller tell you?”

Kaz tells you a lot of things. Told you a lot of things. And what he didn’t tell you, you used his clearance to hear anyway. It had been curiosity at first, and then the only way you could feel safe, prying and siphoning secrets out. You answered all of your own questions.

“Well, he never could resist a pretty face,” Ocelot smooths two thumbs over your cheekbones, small circles. It feels uneven because you are uneven. “Too bad you’ve plugged that leak, hm?”

Civet would tell him something fierce and snappish and sly, but nothing comes to mind for you. You aren’t wired that way. You just watch yourself think, well, that’s true, sir, and I deserve it.

The metronome light is still strobing on and off, and you watch Ocelot’s face in snapshots, like stills of a film reel. He’s very beautiful in a way you aren’t anymore, with the kind of detached, pleasant expression that makes you think of training days. He anchors a hand against your neck with a thumb pressed into the soft spot under your chin, the other going to pull back your gums, check the whites of your eyes. “Tell me about trouble in paradise. _Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s._ ”

You _don’t_ want to, you nip the side of your tongue with your teeth as your jaw moves, the line of Ocelot’s thumb against where you speak, unwillingly. The words fall out of you like rocks, familiar and smooth from digestion. “It’s over. He—apologized. Blinded by things, should’ve put out of his heart years ago, failed as—superior officer and… confidante.” It had been a very practiced speech on his part and a lot of pain medication on yours, but you’re not delusional. You know the break up tone. He’d been all you could look at even then, soft edges and warm colors. Coffee in bed. “I just—wanted to touch him.”

That’s embarrassing. _You’re_ embarrassing—you embarrassed him, and that’s why. Shamed him in front of comrades. Betrayed him and conspired against your XOs. Reverted to what Ocelot made you. It doesn’t count as a breakup if you were never together officially.

Ocelot’s mouth is open a little, the way it does when he’s listening intently and doesn’t care if you know. Your hands and just your hands are trembling and you’ll start to drool on yourself if he doesn’t let go, transfixed. The key’s still in your ignition, he can keep going through the next poem’s line to make you spill everything. Exactly what Kaz had said. The way he didn’t look at you and how you could tell. How he kept his hand on his cane. All of it that you can’t forget or do over. 

“I want to talk about the mission,” Ocelot says, so close your foreheads are almost touching. His voice is a strong, low rope suspending you out of reach. “And your priorities.”

It’s a straightforward conversation. The Major wants to remind you of your duties and your loyalty—always to the Boss first, to orders first, and you have no excuses like Civet getting confused about who the Boss is. Not this time around. Even though you’d been careless with yourself, it had been an interesting exercise in subterfuge. It had cost you Miller, so you know better now. 

This is the abbreviated version. Ocelot lets you keep all of it, but you pare it down for your own sake.

Ocelot wakes up Lion from wherever she’d gone, opens the door and talks to someone in his business voice. The two of you stand there and look dazed at each other—Lion rolls her shoulders the same way Civet does when they’re nervous, but you don’t get any jittery energy off of her. It’s more reptilian, the movement of a sunning crocodile returning to water.

Requisitions comes bearing gifts, and it all looks more like the Boss’s battle dress than what you’d pictured for sneaking through a dark forest—but, what had you pictured? The NBC suits are jungle camo, just like the flak vests and harnesses that go on top. When you step into the rubber casing, it strikes you that you may not be taking it off for a while.

 _Maybe ever,_ Ocelot says, gloved hand on your bare back in a memory. _That’s what I like about you, Moth. The future goes on and off for you like a lightswitch. Doesn’t matter until you get to that room, does it?_

He’s not with you anymore, but you feel him sitting at the back of your skull, like the first thing waiting to swarm out if your higher functions stop. A running commentary of words he’s said to you in different orders or not at all. 

You feel bulky in the full getup, and Requisitions makes you both try on the gas masks, tugging the straps to tighten it like blinders on a horse. There’s an iceberg memory of a training exercise in a sealed room, your own breath fogging up the interior of a mask, only able to see as far as your own hands. Lion gives you a thumbs up and startles you out of reminiscing, but not in time for you to give her one back. Feels like it’d look fake.

She looks faceless in the regalia, even more than you feel. The things that stood out to her about you before—her round lips, the rich shape of her body, everything is wrapped up, disguised in canvas and harness and rubber. Her hair is a dark nest with a single plastic coil escaping towards her neck for her radio. Above the edge of the gas mask you can see her eyes. Half her gaze is on you and the other half seems to be a thousand leagues behind you, into the past or a distance so great it doesn’t yet have a present.

While R&D breaks down the armor spread, Lion holds up a spool of black electrical tape and you hear her through the radio for the first time, the connection turning her voice to flat soda. _“Let’s tape you down.”_

So you stand still, lift your arms from your sides when she pushes them, and watch her tape down all the bits of your armor and kit that might jingle or glint. You don’t know when she did hers, but she jumps in place a few times to demonstrate silence, no reflective gleams. You do it too, reassured that Lion’s dignity isn’t more important to her than the job, or that maybe she’s warming up to you.

There’s a buffet waiting afterwards, R&D hawker Rugged Dingo standing behind the display of whatever Requisitions thinks you could possibly want. Silencers available for everything, thanks to the gunsmith’s insistence on only the best and most tactical for the Boss, and now, the Boss-adjacent. It’s overwhelming, the amount of oiled metal gleaming on the tables in front of you in a tree’s dense root system or a subway map. The two of you enjoy the moment outside of your gas masks, breathing in the scents of expensive weaponry.

Lion tests the draw of a compound bow and for the first time tonight, you want to laugh or smile at the sight. She shakes her head, gas mask around her neck moving a little with the motion when she puts it back, Dingo pulling a face. “What, you don’t like the color?”

“It’s plastic.”

“It’s fiberglass. You want I should go whittle a longbow for you?”

“Pulley system’s too delicate.”

“Oh, the _pulley system_ —”

You pick out a WU pistol, finding a pouch somewhere on your flak vest for an extra silencer. Lion is trying on assault rifles and either intently listening or ignoring Dingo’s advice regarding silencers for them. While you’re looking through the pistols you pick up a Burkov, too—no sense in not having a lethal option. Rules of engagement were very clear with XOF.

There’s a standard MRS-4 rifle you feel confident with, but between that and the two pistols, it already feels like you’re carrying too much. Something like a machinegun or a sniper rifle makes you picture the barrel dragging on the ground, pulling along leaf litter.

Lion takes another assault rifle and a fire axe, just a single sharpened slab of steel painted red. Ocelot comes by to rap his knuckles on the door and Dingo stops trying to sell her on the Official, Boss-spec Machete instead, loading the both of you down with C-4, M21 mines, standard tools. Int-Scope, NVG, regular Fulton devices and a neat package of clip on-devices that they explain will send signals to the wormhole utility. Best used for cargo or unmoving bodies.

Jeroboam is waiting with the rotors going on the closest helipad, and you can’t help but look around to see if Civet or Eagle is visible. They’ll probably be going with Pequod, since they’re going after the Boss. Jeroboam isn’t a usual call sign, and you don’t know the reference or the pilot.

“Other team’s already away,” Ocelot says, hands on his hips and voice raised to be heard over the chopper. “Better get the lead out.”

Lion tromps past him, head down, and he doesn’t watch her climb aboard. He’s only got eyes for you in this moment, his body standing still even as his clothes and hair thrash in the wind of the helicopter blades. He doesn’t say anything and you don’t stop, although he’s turned to watch you lift off as Jeroboam rises up from the helipad.

You and Lion sit on the same bench, facing the same way. Your iDroids beep in tandem as files are transferred to them, but she doesn’t move to check hers when you do. It’s an audio recording, time stamped for only a few hours ago, from the Boss’s iDroid.

There are extra headphones hooked nearby that can connect to the iDroid, so you settle down to listen. You’re sure Lion received the same file, but it’s hard not to think that it was sent specifically to you. Ocelot knows how you’re tuned, how sensitive you are to sound. He wants you to hear the Boss’s final mission recording. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew! Like the author's note says, I'm posting this without being fully finished with the work, which is not my usual MO! I have maybe three or four chapters written and more or less polished, and ton of notes regarding how to get to the end-- but you know how it is! This means the update schedule is going to be real weird, and I appreciate your patience and engagement with the series-- it really means a lot to me, and I'm super excited to share this with you, as a work in progress!


	2. CIVET

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> That's right we got the (gandalf-got-jukes.gif) split narrative baby!

**CIVET**

**SPIT ALL OVER SOMEONE WITH A MOUTHFUL OF MILK**

**IF YOU WANT TO FIND OUT SOMETHING ABOUT HIS PERSONALITY FAST**

The last time you’d been trapped in a confined space with a man you didn’t know well, it hadn’t ended happily for anyone involved. You want to tell Weeping Eagle that, open up the conversation about boundaries between the two of you, or at least establish the pecking order. The briefing and preparation for the mission had felt longer than they had taken: in reality, it couldn’t have been more than an hour since you last stood on Mother Base.

Pequod is keeping his nose out of your business, fully concentrated on piloting and presumably his own guilt. You suppose you’d feel pretty shit too if the Boss had been stolen out from under you. Eagle talks to him with the easy cadence of two men in a similar profession, effortless communication and implied respect. 

That’s something else you hadn’t liked about Eagle, the way he seemed to know everyone and talk to them like friends. If anything, the challenge was to find something you did like about him at first glance. At least something that doesn’t make you wary.

You don’t want to give Eagle the compliment of thinking that he’s totally alien. His skin isn’t: you’ve seen that sun-baked leather and gung-ho squint on Vietnam GIs in newsreels. He has a Midwesterner’s accent and a scar that runs from his nose to his upper lip, tugging his mouth into a little attic. Hardly any eyebrows, too tall to look capable of stealth, and handsome in the same way as a well-used pocketknife.

It’s entirely possible you’re just psyching yourself out, but you feel as if there is a core inside him that doesn’t operate on handshakes and friendly eye contact, but instead the thing that made him one of you. Like what you wear much closer to your surface, like what Moth has smoothed to a fine sheen. It’d make sense—he is, after all, last year’s model, him and Painted Lion. Ocelot’s first litter.

“Nervous, Civet?” Eagle winks, and you grimace at him. Until you can peel back the extra matter to get at what Ocelot shaped and tempered, his amiable neighbor act is just going to get on your nerves. “You’ve been starin’ a hole in me, why I ask.” 

“What have you been doing all this time?” You’re not afraid to put a little demand in your voice.

He scratches his cheek and looks too casual. “Business of war, I guess. Recruiting, taking care of odd jobs for the good Major, enjoyin’ life as a godless mercenary.”

“No, I meant, why haven’t we met before now?”

“Same answer, I expect. Been at this job too long not to be doing fieldwork.” Eagle places an unlit cigarette underneath the scar in his lip, and it sits there, framed. He doesn’t go for a lighter. “And you keep close to the Major, don’t you?”

You bristle. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Probably that you’re more interesting.” Eagle shrugs.

He doesn’t say it like an insult, just a fact, and you almost recoil. Ocelot occupied a bizarre spot in your life, but you’d supposed that it was similar for everyone he trained closely. More interesting than who—Eagle? And Lion, neither of whom you’d seen in the flesh during your whole career before now? 

You could gnaw on him for longer until something splits and the two of you understand each other better, but the flight isn’t going to last forever. Miller didn’t put the two of you together to bond, but to handle a bad situation, to do the unthinkable and rescue Big Boss. You can do that. Eagle can probably keep up.

You adjust yourself in your body armor and your weaponry and decide to shelve any misgivings you have about him. “I want to talk about the mission.” 

Eagle’s head cocks slightly in the other direction, and he makes a face like he’s trying to tell if you’re joking. But he leans in all the same, and listens when you speak.

You were the first one they pulled out of the ether to stand in a room and wait to be briefed, and you had been determined to make everyone regret the choice until you learned it was about the Boss. That was about the only thing that could pull you off the job you’d been given. You’d been in the middle of tracking someone on Mother Base—not Snake, clearly, but an intruder. There was a conspicuously empty space in one of the incoming shipping containers that a flexible body could’ve stored itself in, and there had already been a few Diamond Dogs who hadn’t shown up for shift changes.

Miller had put you on it specifically, immediately, even intimately.

Find whatever it is, he had said, single hand anchored on the back of your neck with the force of two, breath humid on your cheek and neck in the middle of the Security offices. Kill it, and bring me the body. You know he broke things off with Moth, but not to what extent you’re to blame for it, and you imagine that he gets this close to you out of desperation for something. It was a little sad, but he was also doing you a favor putting you to use like this, so it evens out. 

You’d been so ready to finally be on the same side as everyone else again, feeling good about being Mother Base’s hunting dog, only for Ocelot to jerk your lead back not more than an hour later. A possible saboteur on Mother Base was only superseded by Pequod’s emergency report from the field and panicked return. 

Miller bundles the two of you off after the generalized start to the briefing, and you don’t let yourself watch Moth or Lion stay behind with Ocelot. It would be too easy to start worrying about Moth for too many reasons. The commander himself seems almost anxious to do the same, dragging down a projection screen himself and stumping around to keep busy with setting up a map. 

“Isla Cerralvo,” he says brusquely, naming the comma-shaped landmass. There are no real details, just a vague suggestion of mountains running like a spine along the length of it. “It’s an uninhabited island off the Baja Peninsula. North Atlantic and East Pacific FOBs have confirmed the air traffic, and we’ve got some old maps to go on. Not much else.”

“And that’s where we think the Boss is?” Eagle’s weight shifts out of stiff, practiced attention and slouches a bit more.

“It’s not a guess. We only know to start looking here because Ocelot was heavy-handed with his Cipher ties.”

You want to be surprised, but you can’t. It’s more alarming that Ocelot would move with such obviousness.

Eagle puts his hands in his pockets. “So they’ll be on high alert, sir?”

“They’re holding Big fucking Boss, Eagle, they’re already on high alert.”

The room was dimmed for the two of you to get a better look at this useless map, and the yellow light reflects steadily off Miller’s shades. He’s wound tight in a way that you wish you could be—this is, after all, a crisis. The Boss is in enemy hands. Maybe you should be crying or rending your clothes a bit more, but your main emotion is resentment and a need to get _going_. 

“Normally, I’d want to deploy Intel first to get a basic reconnaissance of the island and whatever constitutes the base there, but that’s your perk, isn’t it.” The reflection of light on his glasses intensifies as his head turns. Just a little, but enough to make you feel as if he’s looking directly at you. “You improvise.”

“Yes, and?” Even just from your view of him in profile, Eagle’s smile looks lopsided. “Sir.”

Miller either ignores him or doesn’t get the joke, waving an R&D soldier into the debrief room and breaking eye contact. “Pequod will get you within wormhole deployment range, and stay in the area until you’ve secured the Boss. You should be able to exfiltrate using the wormhole system, but Pequod’s there as an alternative.”

That seems fair enough. You don’t want to get the Boss back just to tell him you lost Pequod underestimating Cipher forces. Both you and Eagle seem to be eyeing the R&D rep with enough doubt to make her try a small smile. “Are you going to tell us what a wormhole is, sir?” You watch Miller clear some folders off the table, avoiding your gaze.

“No, that’s why Blue Linsang’s here.” He gestures again, and Linsang steps forward to hand the two of you small devices, designed to clip to material. It looks mostly like a Fulton without the balloon package, and you resist the impulse to slap it on Miller’s chest and see what happens.

“So, the wormhole Fulton system essentially functions the way traditional Fultons do,” Linsang starts, voice starting high and then evening out. “You apply it to cargo or an unmoving body, and it will create a wormhole to return the selected, ah, object here. To Mother Base.” 

“Oh, well, if that’s all.” Eagle doesn’t sound enthusiastic, the device sitting flat on his palm.

“The Boss has tested it.” Miller snaps. “If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for you.”

“Got me there, Commander.”

“So, what else?” You shove it in your pocket and Linsang retreats before even attempting to asking for it back. “There’s got to be a catch.”

“You want this to be harder?” The commander looks as if he’s glaring daggers at you from behind his shades. It’s the kind of hot, active dislike that you prefer from him over indifference. “Find the Boss, find Eli if he’s there, get them home.”

Linsang looks for a moment as if she wants to say something, before sensing some sharpness from Miller and closing her mouth, returning to straight posture, eyes facing front.

“Alright. We’ll suit up and head out.” Eagle shrugs, arms folded over his chest.

“Do that.” He looks square in that moment, before something sags, all the sharp lines making him up curving just a bit. His mouth remains set in a straight press. “And come back, if you can.”

Eagle salutes without any real crispness, and you don’t even bother before the two of you leave.

Linsang’s waiting for you outside the meeting room, and walks with the two of you down the hall towards where you’re meeting Requisitions to get geared up. She falls into step, but doesn’t speak until the three of you are outside the next door, shifting her weight.

Eagle leans down a bit, sounding more concerned than he had about anything in the briefing. “Blue?”

“The Boss wore the parasite suit. To the island. I’m not really supposed to have clearance to talk about this, but you should know.” Linsang says it all in a rush, but quietly enough. It wouldn’t be enough to avoid the security cameras, but at least it’d show she’s trying not to spread information around.

You can admire that. “What’s it do?”

“Complete active camo, but it runs on the parasites that can be extracted from the Skull Unit. There’s no telling if the charge was depleted by the time they got him, but… if you can bring it back, you’ll be keeping it out of Cipher’s hands.”

“We’ll keep an eye out for it.” Eagle smiles and manages to clap a hand on her shoulder before she leaves, reading as genuine rather than patronizing. 

“ _That_ seemed to have conveniently slipped Miller’s mind.”

“What’s the worst that happens?” His voice is like a shrug. “Parasites get loose, we all die. Or, one enemy soldier who’s invisible. No point in worryin’ about it ‘til we’re there.” 

“Right. How could I have been so foolish.”

Requisitions must know you’re going after the Boss, because they have a full spread waiting, and even two more members just dedicated to suiting you up. Eagle haws and jokes about fairy godmothers, and you break poor Razor Ox’s heart when you tell him you don’t care what you take, as long as it has a silencer. This part of it should be more important to you, this ritual preparation, but it’s not. It feels like wasted time when you could be out there. 

Pequod’s waiting by the time you’re done, Miller presumably already installed in his Support chair, fiddling with radio dials and yelling at staff. There’s no sign of Moth or Lion, which you prefer. Seeing Moth kitted up to go to war would be weird.

You settle in while Eagle schmoozes around Pequod and distracts him during preflight checks, producing a little can of coffee for him out of nowhere. “So, you get a vacation in Baja while we’re out and about, Pequod?”

“Not exactly. There’s a port on the mainland where I’ll be standing by.”

“Bring us back some beers.”

“I’m not leaving the bird.” The pilot’s grim tone makes you look up from your iDroid—you don’t know Pequod that well, but you know the tone.

Eagle takes the coffee back, cracks it open, hands it back to Pequod. “How’s that?”

“The port. ‘La Paz.’” Pequod tries the coffee, grimaces, and keeps it.

Something about that stops the conversation in its tracks, and Eagle retreats as the chopper lifts off, sitting down across from you. 

Pequod drops you both off on the beach of Isla Cerralvo, white sand spraying everywhere, before wishing you luck one last time. It feels like such an obvious entrance, late afternoon under the sun, and you wish you had the cover of night.

Still, it gives you a good look at the island and its mountain and scrub, all of it rumpled and bleak. No signs of people or much activity yet, and at least it isn’t different enough from Afghanistan to be distracting.

_“Alright. Check your iDroids, confirm your position.”_ Miller sounds stressed even over the radio line, and you bitterly hope he’s not going to be breathing down your necks the whole time.

“You betcha, sir.” Eagle clicks his iDroid on and off without looking at the map, and you catch yourself liking him for a moment. “Ready, Civ?” 

“Waiting on you.”

It would’ve been more time effective to drop you with a jeep or a horse, anything, but without knowing exactly what kind of a base you’re headed towards, it would’ve been too dangerous. Just means a lot of hiking for the two of you, up and over one rocky, dry hill after another. There are natural paths formed from weathering and lead to the sea that help a bit, and it gives you time to adjust to the place as a whole. The sky is a deep blue and the land might be pretty if you didn’t picture it holding your Boss captive.

Eagle likes to stop at the peak of every ridge and look with his Int-Scope, scanning the horizon and looking for things. There are a couple of moments where he points out distant shapes that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

“Is that why you’re Eagle?” You shade your eyes with your hand, the two of you paused to drink lukewarm water and check navigation.

He seems to quite genuinely consider it. “I always thought it was on account of my nose.”

_“It’s chosen at random,”_ Miller butts in, suddenly reminding you that he’s there as well. _“What’s your status?”_

“Probably about halfways there.” Eagle offers you bubblegum out of one of his pockets. “Say, Commander, there any wild tarantulas, quicksand out here we should know about? Feels like you’ve usually got more to say on an AO’s ambiance.”

_“You wanna build a vacation home here? It’s a rock. Get moving.”_

The two of you start the next ridge at the same time, although Eagle doesn’t seem ready to give up a chance for someone to banter with. “Aw, sir, that’s like sayin’ Afghanistan’s just sand." 

_“Eagle, if you…”_

Eagle gives you a look over his shoulder, rolling his eyes a little.

Miller doesn’t say anything else, so you adjust the sit of your earpiece and make sure everything’s connected. “If he what?”

There’s a brief jet of static and then a click, followed by more nothing. You say _Miller?_ at the same Eagle asks _Commander?_ but neither gets a response. Just dead air, and the two of you staring like morons at each other.

“Wanna worry about that now or later?” Eagle asks, foot resting on a big rock embedded in the hillside.

“Later.” Miller was on Mother Base, and every single body there would jump in front of a bullet for him. It’s more likely Roaring Centipede tripped over a cable. “We can do this ourselves anyway.”

It’s at the top of the next ridge that you see the Fulton parachute, Eagle already tracking its progress by the time you point at it. “Did you request somethin’?” 

“No. Did you?”

“Maybe Miller came out here to whip my ass for griping.” 

The supplies box lands at an angle and slides with the weight of something heavier than just silencers or extra clips, eventually coming to a dusty stop at the bottom of the next hill. Eagle cocks his head back and forth as the two of you approach, curious but not seeming worried. It looks normal enough under the later afternoon sun, marked like any other supply drop from Mother Base. Doesn't even look tampered with.

You don’t think to have your weapon ready when Eagle steps forward. The top flaps kick open on their own, and Snake stands up as the other walls fold into the dirt around him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❗️


	3. MOTH

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time to read! Those! Tags!

**MOTH**

**SHOOT INTO INFINITE SPACE TO HIT A TARGET IN TIME AND CALL IT INEVITABLE**

Eventually, the navigation console makes a noise and Jeroboam announces unnecessarily that you’ve reached the drop off point. Everything outside the window is darkness and clouds, has been since you left home. He’s talking about something too, reminding you that he won’t be reliable air support, that in theory you’ll wormhole back to him at the end of the mission after confirming coordinates if there isn’t an available LZ. You want to spare more thought for him, since he is your pilot, but he is telegraphing with his body language and mission details that he has orders to leave if anything goes remotely wrong. 

Lion drops one of the outgoing wormhole transponders on the deck as she secures her gas mask and Jeroboam shouts _Good luck!_ even as a strange, perfectly circular bloom of light and energy swallow her downwards. It spits and flickers but waits for you to do the same. Mask on. Weapons secured. Step into it.

Passing through the wormhole is less stressful than you’d imagined—the temperature change is only felt on your skin and your desire to hold your breath makes you expect to feel like dropping into water. The orange beads of energy crawl over and around you like long-lived sparks before you pass through the strange bloom of light, and splash down onto the beach.

And then you’re there.

Lion is a dark shape ahead of you and you focus on her while your body rights itself to a new position in the world—water around your boots. Hot and lapping but not rough. The sand under your boots feels less densely packed than you would’ve thought.

You can smell the lake, once you take deep breathes to try and get through the chewy rubber scent of the mask. Salt’s there. Almost brine, but more caustic and highly concentrated.

Ahead of you, Lion turns back and taps her shoulder with her hand. You move forward to tap the same spot and she nods—just looking for assurance that you’re there and following her progress up the beach.

 _“All your body parts make it through?”_ Ocelot drawls, crackling more due to the distance. It’s still a clear signal though, probably routed through equipment on Jeroboam for boosted strength.

“Yes, sir.” Your voice seems to splash back on your own face, hollowed out by the mask. You let yourself follow Lion while you look up at the island. It’s big, much bigger than you were thinking. Greener. It’d have to be huge to support life in the middle of a salt lake.

The moon is still high and visibility is good, the beach bone white. _The last time I was on a beach like this… Hm. I’ll keep that to myself._ The jungle beyond is dark, and you can see rock cliffs rising up like castle walls.

 _“Good,”_ Ocelot’s voice is the friendly one he normally reserves for the Boss. _“Confirm your location with your iDroid. You’ll want to orient yourself before you plunge in.”_

Lion does not orient herself before she plunges in, so you grab part of her harness and hold on lightly to keep you moving together while you blind yourself with the iDroid. It takes a moment for the map to autoadjust to the present light levels, but it displays clearly as you start to move through the scrubby brush towards the dense jungle. 

_“You don’t need that.”_ Lion murmurs, voice low and quiet and directly in your ear. 

You don’t want to second-guess your partner, but the temptation is to keep looking at the map. There’s something comforting about vague suggestions of topography lines ahead of you, instead of nothing but close foliage and darkness. A sea of unfamiliar insect sounds that you’ve gotten used to not having on Mother Base.

Ocelot audibly sighs when he hears you put the iDroid away, but doesn’t offer an actual reprimand. It occurs to you now that maybe he’s babysitting the both of you more closely as a stress response to having misplaced the Boss. That part of the mission hasn’t sunk in for you yet—maybe for Civet and Eagle it’s more pressing, but the debrief with Ocelot had minimized the gut-churning panic of it.

Lion moves how you think the Boss would, when you let her go and focus on following. She’s quiet, sliding underneath bars of moonlight that make it through the canopy and stepping lightly, deliberately. If it were any other situation, you would stop moving and silence your own noises so you could see how long it took her to vanish into the jungle totally, but that’s inappropriate for a mission. And you’d probably lose her.

_“The XOF encampment is marked on your map. Watch out for additional traps set by the Mbele kids around the perimeter—XOF might’ve sprung most of them, but they had plenty of time to be thorough.”_

Following the Boss’s path, you see the remains of a few traps sprung already—beyond the uncovered punji traps and clipped tripwires, there’s a pile of recently-disturbed logs, some jammed against standing trees. Looking up, you can see the steep rise of a rocky hill where they must have been propped up before the trap was sprung, logs rolling downhill in a landslide to try and crush the Boss.

“How did kids set up a trap with full-sized logs?”

 _“They got Sahelanthropus all the way there,”_ Ocelot answers, with a tone that’s half a shrug and half a scolding. _“You think a couple of trees presents any difficulty?”_

Nobody had told you exactly how they’d done that, either. 

Your lower face covered by the mask itches terribly, slick with sweat. The humidity is oppressive, and no breeze threads through the trees. Lion has put aside her rifle and is moving with both hands in front of her, touching the low trunks of trees or pressing aside branches for you.

The light is the same as it was on the dunes in Ibiza. Blue and gray. Everything else is different, but the light is the same, folded in by the canopy and the late night.

Under your feet, the blanket of leaves and grasses starts to give way to something more rocky, and your ankles register the upwards climb before the rest of you. Lion settles down against a boulder, laying flat and gesturing you up beside her.

The ridge had swelled underneath you without your notice, and below you can see the XOF camp. It’s smaller than you had expected, mostly tents, trucks, generators. The floodlights seem preoccupied by the jungle immediately in front of the cleared space, demarcated by splintered trees and hacked underbrush. They might as well be looking at a wall for how dense the forest is. From this elevation, you can see the remains of smoldering fires, and your breath catches briefly when Sahelanthropus resolves—gleaming and twisted metal under the stars. It doesn’t look bipedal at this angle, but there’s something corpselike about it anyway. Mechanical offal.

 _“Reached a recon point?”_ Ocelot asks, impatiently.

“Yes, sir.” You don’t think Lion’s going to be talking much. To him or you. “We can see the XOF camp and Sahelanthropus.”

_“Good. What’s the activity level?”_

“Slow, sir.” There are guards patrolling. Lion is just staring, but you’re not about to try and keep up with her standards—your Int-Scope is too good not to use. “There are a lot of men, but all fairly spread out. Loadout looks standard for XOF, but some of the perimeter guards have NVGs.”

_“Choose your approach carefully. If you set off an alarm, they might decide to burn the whole place just to get to you.”_

You can pretend to feel Civet rankling. They’d hate this kind of hand-holding, and you’re not really a fan either.

 _“Hey,”_ Lion says, squirming around briefly on the boulder to look at you. Her tone makes you think maybe she’s forgotten your name. _“Forget the guards. Find the kids.”_

Is this an order or encouragement? You feel like she’s speaking a different language. “Sorry, what?”

 _“You don’t have to handle the perimeter guards,”_ she says, making eye contact with you. Her speaking pace is always slow, but you think she might be enunciating more just for you. _“The Major said there were kids. You go in and extract the kids.”_

 _“Lion can manage alone,”_ Ocelot interjects, another chef in the kitchen. _“You’ve both got Fultons if you run into anything you want to send home straight to us. But you’ll have to communicate more if you split up.”_

“Sir, respectfully?” You feel stifled in the gas mask suddenly, the temptation to tear it off and breathe fresh, lethal air is overwhelming. “I know. Lion knows. We’ll signal if we need you.” 

You stare at Lion as Ocelot is silent on the line for a moment, figuring that the worst he can do is just leave you on this island to die, and that might already happen anyway. _“Fair enough, Moth. Standing by.”_ He sounds so reasonable about being told to shut up that you feel light-headed, but it makes sense. He trained you to be independent, he had to expect that at some point you wouldn’t want him coaching you.

“Okay. You’ll keep the guards busy, I’ll start checking the tents.” You put a hand on Lion’s shoulder, the one she’d let you touch before. “Is that right?”

_“Yeah.”_

“Can you find a quiet way for the both of us to get closer to Sahelanthropus, too?”

_“Yeah.”_

“Okay.” You feel like you should be using more acronyms or hand signals. This is the informal way you would marshal yourself, but you want to keep things clear with Lion. She makes you feel like you’re the only one complicating anything. “Call if you need me.”

Lion pats your hand on her shoulder once, before removing it like she might pick off a large spider and slips away into the darkness.

It should’ve been obvious from the way you’ve been in the past, but it feels better to be alone, knowing Lion is out there but only being responsible for yourself in that moment. Even working together with Civet had been mostly a distanced thing, a few intense moments of closeness and then trusting that they would trust you. Trusting your own influence on them.

You pick your own way down to the camp, finding that it requires more direct attention when you don’t have Lion’s footsteps to follow. She made it look easy, but you manage alright. It’s steadier terrain than shifting sand dunes.

By the time you’re about level with the camp clearing, a few guards have dropped off your Int-Scope display. You don’t know if their patrol route has just provided you with a good opening to sneak towards the cluster of tents or if Lion just worked that fast, and ultimately, it doesn’t matter. You keep your Burkov in hand, creeping under a truck before brushing into the first tent.

Mostly administrative work. A map. There are hanging files on the desk that you pull out, immediately spilling great swathes of glossy photos. Medical examinations of infected corpses shining wetly under camera flash.

“Sir?” You hold your iDroid steady as it scans the surface photos, a couple of the documents sighing hot ink as the light crawls over them. “They’re here for the vocal parasites, for sure.”

_“Good find, but we knew that was likely. Anything else?”_

_“Security around the machine is light.”_ Lion says, tone guttural from being flat on the ground somewhere. _“Concertina wire and barricade perimeter, one entrance.”_

_“No activity?”_

_“Skeleton crew. … Inattentive.”_

The standard black tents for admin and logistics work are near each other, and they provide a neat trail to the entrance of the hazmat tent, a long dogleg of white reinforced plastics and tarps. Electric lights are on inside and a diesel generator is still chewing away near what you think of as being the back of the camp. 

There’s only one guard posted at the entrance that you can see, in black XOF gear. NVGs stuck to his forehead like a baseball cap in classic end of shift slacking. Why not? They already got Big Boss.

You lift your gun and fire one silenced round—although his head jerks back, he doesn’t fall over noisily, knees going before anything else. It’s easy to drag him back and into the tent, stow him under a desk, no keycards or security measures you can find on him. 

How had you thought about them before? Obstacles? They had been obstacles between you and Kaz, like hurdles to jump. They seem more like aspects of the scenery tonight. Branches to press out of your path, like Lion had done earlier.

Inside the hazmat tent you feel, for the first time, like an intruder. Everything is well-lit and you know you’re covered in mud and jungle, the temperature several degrees cooler than it had been outside. The hum of electronic equipment, boxes of instruments packed up and labeled obtusely. There are orange biohazard stickers everywhere, shreds of clear plastic left over from rapid packing and unpacking activity.

There’s movement around the curve and you press down low against some cold metal drums to get a better angle—it’s just another lone XOF agent, this time in a full one-piece hooded hazmat suit, a real bulky one. Serious science. Unarmed, placing sealed organ samples from a stand near an operating table into a cooler gushing dry ice fumes.

You’re not sure a tranq round would make it through the rubber, not if he’s got on more gear underneath. Holstering your gun, you try to listen to yourself, ears ringing with the intensity of it. But you’re silent. Lion’s tape does a good job holding you tight against your own body. The XOF guy struggles once as you kick his knee out from under him just as you loop arms around his neck and shoulders, drag him back against your chest—you’re not the Boss, but you can still ambush a guy with the best of them.

To his credit, he doesn’t struggle long, not when you’ve got a knife pressed up against the soft yellow plastic of his hazmat suit. It’s a bad angle, but you can see through the clear face shield at the front that he’s let his gas mask down around his chin for comfort. You only have to puncture his suit to kill him. Inattentive.

You’re going to prioritize asking him how big the XOF force is on the island—if you get a rough estimate, it might help Lion determine how many are on patrol. Where they took the Boss. Whether or not this is the only scientist and how expendable that makes him. When reinforcements are coming, if they are, how they’re planning on transporting Sahelanthropus off the island.

It doesn’t take you long to organize your questions, but they drop out of your grip like loose change when you look at the operating table. It’s just a blue sheet with a square into an empty body cavity, but a small brown hand hangs off the edge underneath the surgical drape. The XOF scientist says words to you in an American accent while you stare at that small, unimaginable tableau under the white lights, and you draw your gun to shoot him through the top of the head. The body in your arm jerks as the bullet tears around inside him, sagging heavy and limp.

_“Moth, report.”_

You sheathe your knife, drop the hazmat suit to the floor with a full-bodied thump. The gun stays in your hand. The dry ice is full of squares of plastic, shrink-wrapped around dark, smooth gemstones of flesh. Small organs. The small hand. _Plenty of live and dead tissue samples._

 _“Brass Moth,_ report _.”_

Training wants you to set C4, tape it under the gurney, and turn away. The rest of you wants to scream and never stop. The two continents grate against each other inside you, forming trenches and mountains where there had been nothing before.

 _“Where are you?”_ That low and deliberate tone he normally saves for triggers.

“Hazmat tent. Sur— surgical theater.”

_“Tell me what you’re seeing.”_

You want Civet to tell him to fuck off, but you can’t summon them to talk out of your mouth. You can see a dissection in progress. You can see life support systems hanging wrapped in plastic, unused and seals unbroken. You can see bright lights. You’re embarrassing Lion with your silence, with your difficulty. The mission. The Boss. Orders.

“XOF set up a… lab for taking samples. Medical equipment.”

_“What does your body feel?”_

“Cold.” The coldest spot in the room are the metal drums you’d passed by. Thick power cables vein the fringes of the tent and lead to them. “There are refrigeration units.”

_“What’s inside the refrigeration units?”_

There are big handles to twist and unlock the tops of the drums. Four drums total. When you twist the release, the center of the drum hisses out shockingly cold air and moves upwards on springs and tracks that belay the weight of what’s contained within.

“One of the Mbele kids, sir.” Curled up in the fetal position, suspended and hooked up to all kinds of breathing tubes and wires inside the tank. Some chemical in the suspension liquid makes him look green, sickly. Very science fiction. You can feel the cold radiating off it in slow curls, and there’s an abbreviated heart monitor screen inset in to the back of the tank. “He has a heartbeat.”

_“Ah, cryogenic stasis. That’s an old Cipher trick. Check the others.”_

You don’t want to look at this child. The way his limbs are curled up tight like he’s just sleeping in a ball. The bottoms of his feet, rough from being barefoot and then from too-big boots. You never interacted with them, but you can remember hearing them playing, the way it bounced off walls and lit up the whole platform. 

The next one has Eli in it. He looks smaller than you remember, stripped of trophies and covered in scrapes, one big bruise on his chest. There’s a little bloom of darkness in the liquid near his mouth from a split lip. A big plastic sticker over the glass marks him _NONCONTAGIOUS_.

The one after that is just larger parts, some ragged and others precisely cut, and you breathe deeply as you slide it back into the drum casing.

The last one is another kid. All in one piece, heart monitor beeping.

“Two Mbele squad, Eli, and a sam... sample collection, sir." 

_“Do you have your wormhole Fulton devices with you?”_

_Think I fucking dropped them somewhere? You think I’m a fucking idiot? You think I just leave my kit everywhere?_ You want to draw on Civet, to prop yourself up with their anger, but you don’t want them to see this. To be here. Not ever. “Yes, sir.”

_“That’s good, Moth. You’re doing well.”_

Pushing the tanks back into the drums, you seal all of them up, set each with its own Fulton tracker. Standing back, you press the button and watch as the four of them are vacuumed into light and space, noiseless but for the crackling of the wormholes. The impulse to stick your head in one before it closes passes by with the speed of an ad on the side of a bus. “Please confirm delivery, sir.”

Some radio crackle, a wait. _“The extractions arrived. We’ve got R &D right here to take them. Medical too.”_ Ocelot’s voice is soft but persistent. _“Tell me what you’re here to do.”_

“Extract Sahelanthropus.”

 _“Standing by for rendezvous point.”_ Lion says, automatically. Her tone hasn’t changed once over the whole mission, and you feel a dull, misplaced resentment that she’s dealing with this better than you are. That she gets to skip out on this horror, that you know you’re going to find it inside yourself for the rest of your life.

“Hazmat building, southern entrance.”

 _“Unadvised,”_ Ocelot breaks in. _“If there’s nothing else in that area, you need to—”_

Undergrowth rustles on Lion’s end. _“Moving.”_

Ocelot hails you on a private channel and you don’t answer. You aren’t going to inflict this on her, but you’d like him to think you might.

You wait by the entrance, watching the darkness. With the light of the hazmat tent at your back, outside looks gray, opaque. Like a field of dust or fog. You need something, but you can’t puke in the gas mask. You can’t do what your body and heart needs right now, to scream and run and tear the island apart. Let it sink into the salt. 

Lion materializes out of the gloom, axe in hand. There’s blood on it. She comes to a stop in front of you, patient. The two of you standing upright, in the open, in the enemy encampment seems ridiculous. Beyond stupid. 

_“Whatever’s in there,”_ Lion says, looking directly into your eyes. _“You need to share it?”_

“Ask me later.” Your mouth quirks under the mask.

Even with your eyes open, you see the hand under the sheet. The negative of the image sits on your eyelids. The shape of it, like a delicate puzzle piece. Like your hand, but smaller, a perfect miniature. Blunt fingernails with crescent moons of dirt underneath. Nicks of pink from healed scratches.

Lion takes your hand and puts it on her shoulder, holds it in place when you want to jerk away. It’s disconcerting to think that she can read your distress when you should be shelving it, but she _is_ supposed to be your contemporary. She’s your partner.

 _“Status, away team?”_ Ocelot asks. He’s been very patient, is being very patient. You’ll pay for it later.

 _“Continuing on to the machine for retrieval.”_ Lion moves back towards the darkness but gives your hand a tug before she lets go. You fall into step behind her, two pairs of boots on the bare earth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And Moth takes... (rolls a d20) ... six points of psychic damage!


	4. CIVET

**CIVET**

**MEN DON'T PROTECT YOU ANYMORE**

Snake meets you with the same forward velocity that you’re putting towards him, and the force of it sends you both rolling for a moment, dry scrub jabbing into your ribs, the backs of your legs. You keep expecting him to pull back and hit you, because it’s what you’re trying to do, but instead Snake stays close, unafraid to use his entire body to pin you, to loop his arms and constrict until he has you pinned face-first to the hillside. Rocks dig into your face and there’s dust in your nose and mouth, pluming out as you breathe hard from fear and anger.

“Hey, Civet.” He’s at a range where you can feel his body move when he talks. “Together again, huh?”

You need to say something back to him, let him know you’re neither shocked nor cowed, you need to open your mouth and close it around his face, bite his nose off, tear a chunk from his ear, _some_ thing, but nothing happens. You struggle and let out an involuntary noise as his weight shifts, and Snake gives you a little shake to see if he’s broken you. You don’t know what he’ll do if he has.

Eagle appears out of nowhere, laughing and friendly and it seems to chase Snake off you just out of surprise for a moment, he’s pulling Snake off you and into kind of a manly embrace— “Boss, now, _you’re_ a sight for sore eyes!”

You take the opportunity to scramble upright, put your hand on your gun and watch, furious and ashamed. Eagle’s arms are clasped genuinely around Snake, eyes shut in apparent enjoyment, and you feel your guts go cold. Outnumbered. Eagle would side with him over you in a heartbeat, no two ways about it. But, hadn’t he also just—sort of, only sort of— saved you? Had he known?

“Uh.” Snake is the one to pull away first. “Thanks.”

“What brings you ‘round here? Same as us?” Eagle doesn’t blink when he should, parts of his face locked as he smiles. “They sent us after the Boss.”

“Got it in one.” Snake looks at you, horribly real and in a somewhat average sneaking suit. You could smell the cigar on him when he was near. Nothing had changed. He had not changed. “Kaz sent me as backup for you two.”

“Bullshit,” You blurt, just as Eagle says, “He would, wouldn’t he?” Snake sends you a smug look. It’s not even a _good_ lie. 

“Well, in that case, sir, glad to have you on our side.” Eagle steps over and slaps you on the back, raising a cloud of dust. “Between the three of us they aren’t standing much of a chance, huh?”

You don’t know how else to communicate with Snake, so you bare your teeth at him.

Relentlessly, the march resumes without much difference than before, except that Snake is on point. You want to make him nervous about turning his back on you, but you don’t want to risk out and out violence when you aren’t sure about Eagle, and you don’t think he has the capacity for nervousness anyway. You trail a bit farther behind Snake, not entirely out of earshot, but enough that Eagle senses you want to talk to him.

“Eagle, I _heard_ you. You know we’re going after the Boss, you said it.”

“Sure did. And we’ve got the Boss helping us.” Some of that eager to please golden retriever fades out of his face, revealing a weary tension. “Got a third pair of hands on the mission, Civ, what else’s it matter?”

“We can’t trust him.”

“Now, Civet,” Eagle says, in a chiding, teacherly tone that you know is supposed to rile you up. “The Boss stuck with me through Vietnam. What’s not to trust about that?”

There’s a hint of irony in his tone, and you see for a moment some of his age, some of Ocelot’s subsurface construction. Eagle is, in a subtle way, telling you that he knows it’s fucked, that he knows something is wrong, but unlike you, he’s just letting it happen. Least resistance. 

He seems to read this off your face, pats you on the shoulder before picking up his pace and returning to the climb over the ridge. “When the Boss sets his mind to somethin’, you just gotta follow him through it.”

There’s a moment where you want to know everything, everything about Eagle, to unzip him and see exactly how he works and how much he’s like you, like Moth, but it’s not the time or the place.

Snake’s at the top of the ridge before you, standing silhouetted against the low sun like a Western painting. He’s using Eagle’s Int-Scope and the two of them point, discuss something on the horizon, laugh like old friends. Something about that sets you off, and you lunge for the backs of his legs, the momentum sending you both down the hill. You hear the Int-Scope crack on the way down.

A rock clips the back of your head and you lose focus, long enough for Snake to pin you again, his boots grinding furiously against the hillside and slowing the both of you. It brings you face to face with him, some of the good humor gone.

“You got the first one for free,” Snake mutters, blotting out the sky and the island behind him. “But if you’re going to be a hassle, we’ll leave you right here.”

It’s generous that he even includes Eagle, when you know that you aren’t enough to take him alone.

“You shouldn’t be here. You _shouldn’t_.” There was a part of you that had thought you’d banished him, that you had truly defeated him and made him go away. “What are you doing?”

“Stop worrying about it.”

“Are you going to kill Venom?”

He looks surprised, the same blink and quirk of the eyebrows that Venom does, and you want to snap at him like a dog. “No.” His hand finds your neck as he leans in, your gaze forced to the dry blue sky over his shoulder, his breath thundering against your ear. “Unless you want me to.”

You struggle with your full body, the thought giving you the same sensation as biting down on a living insect. Snake presses harder into you and all your signals go haywire, mixed up between abject fear and the thought of the two of you rutting right here with Eagle standing guard.

“Easy, Civet.” He applies more pressure to your throat in what you recognize as a soothing way. “The earth is flat, right? We can be friends. Just for one mission.”

The trigger phrase makes your brain lose gravity for a moment, but he doesn’t say it with the weight of a command, more like an inside joke. Between friends. You can fight him here on the slope and die, or you can trust yourself to deal with whatever happens. Like Eagle. Your body relaxes, given permission to submit, and Snake gets off, hauls you up, smacks some dirt off your armor.

Eagle clambers down the slope, ruefully tapping the cracked Int-Scope lens with his fingernail. “Gonna take that out of my pay, sir?”

“You know it. Be more careful with your tools.”

The camp finally appears over one last ridge, and the three of you lay flat, watching it. It looks nondescript in the way you’ve come to associate with Cipher, clearly American military supplies with the labels scrubbed off. No flag is flying, and you see a lot of empty shipping containers, hastily set-up floodlights pointed at the desert scrub. There’s a main bunker set into a hillside, square angles of concrete marking the entrance, some windows, but you figure most of it must be underground. It sits in a half-moon shape, two peninsulas separating what looks like an administrative block and the loading dock, complete with freshly-painted helipad.

“Looks kinda nuclear, huh?” Eagle’s chin is resting on his hands, the pose boyish in a way that doesn’t suit him. “The bunker.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. You can dig a shelter anywhere if you have enough money.” Snake has your Int-Scope now, and seems to be pointing out gun placements and guards mostly for your benefit. “Check out that guy. No one knows where they’re supposed to be looking. This is a new post for them.”

Eagle hums. “Think they made it up special just for the Boss?”

“Cipher’s got black sites everywhere. Setting up a new one from scratch doesn’t make much sense.”

“Well, that’s what they did,” you say, trying not to sound sulky. “How are we getting in?”

Snake passes you the Int-Scope. “You tell me.” 

This feels like a test, which you resent. Partly because you don’t need to prove yourself to him, and partly because you know you’ll rise to the bait anyway. You watch the guards, try to ignore Snake lighting a cigar right next to you, as obnoxious as the crack in the lens.

“The loading dock, entrance at the east. It might be guarded, but there’s plenty of places to hide.”

“Sounds good.” Snake doesn’t seem overly concerned. Eagle shades his eyes with his hand for a moment, studiously not paying attention to the two of you.

You keep watching the loading bay, waiting for something to change your mind about it. There isn’t a lot of activity at the moment—the camp seems barebones at best, and not a lot of activity is being put forth to solidify it. Maybe it’s supposed to be a staging area for moving the Boss to another, more secure location. In the distance, a helicopter spins up and begins moving away from you, towards the direction of the mainland peninsula.

“How’s, uh,” The cigar tips upwards in thought. “Butterfly?”

“I can’t wait until you’re old, and Ocelot loses interest when your dick stops working.”

“Fat chance.” Snake picks a twig out of the neck of your armor. “He loves my personality.”

Eagle clears his throat, starts talking about approaches and wind direction. There’s only so much planning you can stand, Snake reaching his limit just before you, wordlessly slinking off to skirt the edge of the ridge hemming in the bunker. To his credit, Eagle doesn’t follow like a duckling, instead picking his own parallel path, staying low as you enter into the range of vision for the guards. 

Your mind should only be on getting to the loading dock under your own direction, but it’s impossible for your attention to resist warping around Snake. He moves decisively and only ever finds cover big enough for him—try and stay close and you’d leave your ass sticking out from behind a rock.

It makes you remember all over that this is Snake. Big Boss, the legendary soldier, not actively an enemy, but on your side. Friends, just for one mission.

The loading dock space doubles as a helipad, the paint fresh enough to stink when the wind changes. A XOF soldier, kitted for hazmat, weirdly, is posted facing east, away from the interior of the dock. Just about asleep on his feet, too. Across the clearing you see Eagle slide between two shipping containers, one a rusted hulk and the other almost spotlessly new. 

You’ve lost sight of Snake, but his presence hangs like a cloud passing over the sun. It’s a kind of stupid comfort in some ways: you know what the most dangerous thing on the island is, and he’s running with you.

Glancing back, you see the guard posted towards the east is gone. 

Inside the shade of the loading dock, you see another guard smoking near the double doors heading to what must be the utility guts of the bunker. Improbably, Eagle walks up to him and asks for a light, the guard’s face only looking surprised when his hand fishes a lighter out of his vest pocket automatically. Eagle punches him sharply and flicks a knife out as he rushes the guy, enveloping him off his feet behind a dusty girder and a stack of dry-rotted pallets. Snake materializes and holds the guard’s kicking boots quiet while Eagle asks for directions, and you leave the sideways afternoon light for the dock’s gloom.

“Not much use,” Eagle sighs, the three of you reconvening behind some shipping crates crusted with cobwebs. “He didn’t even know why he’s here.”

“New boots,” Snake grunts, holding one of the dead man’s feet up: the tread is still sharp and the laces are too clean.

Whatever. So XOF hasn’t told them what’s going on. Would they fight harder knowing they had a prize here, or that they were up against Big Boss?

Inside, there’s an overwhelming smell of abandoned building, mildew and stale air. The hallways are veined with fresh extension cords, lights infrequently posted and too modern amid a very Cold War tomb chic. There’s a far-off hum of a diesel generator if you listen hard. Snake gestures you to take point, and you focus on the concrete labyrinth instead of feeling him at your back.

There are guards in the hallway, some in XOF black and others in desert fatigues, like they’d actually planned to be here. Even a silenced gun might be too loud in a space like this, so you keep your guns holstered, lunging first for the throat when you can.

Snake is always there to lower the body before it falls, wrench a hand away from a gun. A man breaks his front tooth on your forearm as Snake kills him in your arms. No judgement or critique, just assists when you need them, and you don’t _need_ them, but it’s about speed and professionalism.

It’s hard to truly like anything about Snake, but he moves with confidence and doesn’t doubt yours. Whether because he doesn’t care if you fuck up or because he knows you, knows how hard you’ll fight. It’s a sort of respect that none of the XOs have ever afforded you, even Ocelot.

You can determine the exact moment when you catch yourself forgetting for an instant who he is, what he’s done to you: there are two guards outside a room, and Snake passes you a thin loop of wire, warm from his body heat. The short distance to close between them and you makes their guns seem tangled in their hands, Snake disarming the one closest to him with an automatic grace. You end up mirroring Snake once the garrote is around your guard’s neck: a XOF body struggling over your back while you pull forward with your combined body weights.

Snake’s one, bright eye meets yours and you catch him sawing a little with the pressure on his guard’s neck, the active fight for life ending with a final jerk. Vicious and practical and unconcerned, and worse, you don’t feel disgusted.

Eagle kneels down to pick the door’s lock, and Snake gestures your hand down when you try to give him the garrote back. “Keep it.”

You should lash it at him like a whip and snarl that you don’t need or want gifts from him. But it’s better to have a tool like this than not, so you keep it in your hand, fingers humming with recovering circulation. You can keep it for one mission.

Inside, it’s just a meeting room, an old and dust-frosted table made out of lacquered wood in an imitation of government set-dressing. Eagle drags the dead guards in behind you, keeping watch at the door. 

The cheap wood paneling on the walls makes your skin crawl, and you feel like the air is moving in a way it shouldn’t. Almost not stifling enough. Snake stares at a yellow map of the island tacked up on the wall and loses interest, turning to go.

You hold out a hand and he stops, all that attention shifting onto you like an ocean swell. There’s something about the room, the weird cramped size of it, the paper-pusher quality of it… the paneling.

Running your fingers along it, you keep your face almost flush to the wood, following a hunch. Snake leads your gaze with a flashlight, and you see the tiny scratches on panel seam right before the room’s corner. You can’t work your nails into it, but you can loop the garrote wire over the corner and tug, dislodging it enough to get your fingers in. Snake holds the flashlight in his teeth as he gives you a hand.

The secret door is pretty shitty, construction-wise, and the tunnel behind it is small like it’s more of a gap between support walls than its own structure.

“Not bad,” Snake says, briefly touching the scratches on the panel that had tipped you off.

“The air smelled different. It’s obvious.”

“Would’ve fooled me.” He shines the light into the narrow gloom, revealing nothing but old pipes and plaster, concrete. Darkness.

“I found it. You go first.”

“Beauty before age, Civet.”

“Are you scared?”

“I want you to clear the cobwebs first.”

“Odds are this just leads back to the helipad,” Eagle interjects, dryly. “But don’t let me spoil the fun.”

You turn a scowl on him for catching you playing nice with Snake. “What’s your reasoning?”

“Bits of dust wiped off on the pipes, you can see it glinting.” Eagle points. “And there was a chopper leaving as we got here. Bet you anything someone made a quick exit.”

Snake straightens up, getting cold and focused in a realigning of his posture. Both you and Eagle are completely shut out of his thoughts for a moment, but the limbo where you wait for him to act isn’t unpleasant. Isn’t frustrating, knowing the next move will be action.

“We keep moving. Good to know this is here, but it’s not time to leave yet.”

Snake takes point back effortlessly, pushing forward through the facility more aggressively. You and Eagle are hunting animals, Snake doesn’t even need to gesture for one of you to take an approaching guard. For however long it lasts, you fall into the feeling of being in a pack, moving parts of a machine. As quickly as it forms, it slips away again. The bunker branches, the first signage proclaiming in Spanish as one way being admin, the other as storage. 

Snake narrows his eyes, looking down the admin path. “It’s time to split up. Which way are you headed, Civet?”

The choice jars you. You’d been assuming that you would stay with him, that this would continue. Eagle is going to go to storage, you know, and if you lose track of Snake, you won’t find him again. This is felt in your bones.

But if you went with him. You’d leave the island with him, this one mission stretching into forever. This is felt in your blood.

You could hold onto Snake with your legs as he was dropped out of the bomber’s bay, fling your hat off into the sky and scream all the way down, and it wouldn’t last but it would be so easy. You aren’t Ocelot, you can’t be in it for the long haul, but Snake would burn you bright and fast before any of it got stale.

What he did to Moth isn’t in your mind, what he’s done to you is, and how it had felt awful at the time, how it feels challenging and right now. He’d wanted to take you with him, before he left Mother Base, and seeing what that would mean, now, makes it less terrifying. Even appealing, in the way of a deathwish.

How much you want the wild, vicious energy of that kind of life hits you like cold water, and you almost stumble back into Eagle. “No. I’m—I’m going this way.”

Snake shrugs. “Suit yourself.” And like that, he rounds the corner and is gone from sight.

A breath staggers out of you, and Eagle rests a hand on your shoulder, keeping his voice low. “Thanks for the backup, Civ. Let’s find the Boss, high tail it home.”

“Yeah. Let’s.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Animal magnetism...


	5. MOTH

**MOTH**

**ARE YOU TIRED OF BEING NICE?**

**DON’T YOU JUST WANT TO GO APE SHIT**

Sahelanthropus is a mountainous corpse. Torn almost in half from some great external force or battle, the legs sitting at a bad angle away from the torso and the dinosaur head pointed skyward. You climb onto the chest chassis like a steep hill or a boulder, navigating the flat planes and new angles battered into it. The Boss fought it once before he brought it home, and he must’ve faced it again here. How, you can’t imagine.

Lion had been right—the whole thing lay in a field of tall saw grass surrounded by concertina wire and concrete barricades, with just one open space functioning as a gate. Presumably there had been a guard, too, but Lion doesn’t make any mention of that as she leads you in.

 _“Made it to the machine, sir.”_ Lion nudges you with her elbow, pointing at your iDroid. You try to scan the main chunk, but it just gives you a bunch of blueprints you already know and flashes warnings. The whole thing is ripe with unused archaea, munitions, flammable chemicals.

_“What’s the state of it?”_

_“Bad.”_

_“Attach what you can to Fulton devices and send it home. Then we’ll coordinate your return to Jeroboam.”_ It must be a funny holdover from working with real people, the necessity of having to hold their survival hostage in return for completion of the mission. Ocelot sounds distracted, voice fading in and out as he leans away and back to the mic for some reason. _“Hell’s bells.”_

The irregularity of that seems to give you a foothold to get back into the work. Your body, your purpose. “Sir?”

 _“I’m handing you off to Screaming Wallaby. Something requires my attention here—you understand, don’t you?”_ The way he says it is a caricature of himself, vaguely threatening you to ask why or demand details. Clumsy.

Lion meets your gaze in the dark, the two of you standing on Sahelanthropus together. “Alright, sir.”

The chest is open to the air at several points, exposing pipes and struts big enough to climb through. The whole thing looks like it would fall apart if you moved it. There’s no way the whole camp won’t immediately notice the giant robot getting either wormholed or ballooned away, so it’s not truly much of an exit strategy. Why hadn’t anyone addressed that in the briefing?

_“Screaming Wallaby here. What’s your status, away team? Any hostile contact? Supply requests? Over.”_

You try the NVGs to look into the mess of wires and sharp metal underneath you. Lion stares at you like this sudden change in handler is your fault. “We’re… good, Wallaby. No support needed at the moment.”

_“Copy. Standing by, over.”_

You want to rub your face with your hands, but most of it is covered by gas mask, and you don’t want to grind any bacteria into your eyes.

Squatting, Lion breathes out a long sigh into her mask. _“This zeek is junk.”_

You pass over the word you don’t know, understanding the meaning of it. This wasn’t the glorious war machine the blueprints had promised. It’s several weighty chunks of steel and uranium hammered in and out of shape. A pre-nuclear disaster. What had it done besides bring pain and misfortune to everyone? You’re having a hard time parsing its worth, remembering how this fits in to what the Boss wants. How you’re supposed to execute his wishes.

You know you haven’t left the hazmat tent in any way that matters. You know you need to keep going, keep momentum up. Just Fulton the scrap home and worry about it later.

_You’ll take this thing home and leave him here?_

Inside you isn’t Civet, and it’s not Ocelot. The sweat pooling all over your body is cold.

You’re stuck staring into the ragged pit of Sahelanthropus’ chest. When you look up, you don’t see anything but the night sky. Lion looks up with you, and you find yourself letting go of something you had been holding onto with all your strength. Under all the kit and the flak vest and the suit and the mask, you feel light. Untethered.

Something had gone wrong at some point. Something had crossed a line, snipped a wire—there was no going back. It has something to do with the hazmat tent. The idea that the island, that the English strain, the bipedal nuke, that any of it was worth—

The math just didn’t add up. It wasn’t reconcilable. _It’s the will of the Boss. You have orders_. He trained you to operate independently, to make inhuman decisions. _He trained you to follow orders._ Your available options were letting XOF have it, or bringing it home. Bringing it home is the only way to successfully complete the mission, your orders. There is no third path, no third chapter.

 _“Moth,”_ Lion says.

You squeeze your eyes shut. “I need a minute.”

You can almost hear it. Voices in another room, the music of a conversation and none of the complications of words. Just intent through tone. Pressing your hands to your ears makes you think it’s a radio play through headphones.

Ocelot, and yes, Kaz, arguing with you. You aren’t answering, and their words don’t make any real sense. Just the pitch and fever of telling you that you are wrong, to trust them, that you trusted them with yourself and now you’ve got a job, you have orders, bring home the machine. Bring home the walking nuke. You can’t stop time, you can’t reverse it, you can’t save the kids, you can’t sew them up, you can only move forward.

Civet explains now, in their sort of halting and almost bashful way of talking about feelings, the sensation of being in Mother Base, to feel the physical space line up with your bones and make sense, how the line between outside and inside can blur. You reach out and feel the island around you, diseased and moaning, preserved by the salt.

It’s ruined you, spoiled the basic genes of what you should be. Everything that grows from you will be wrong. But there is an instrument of revenge. You can be the one who ruins.

 _Hey, look behind you._ You can feel someone watching. _I said, look behind you._

It’s just the night, when you turn and look. You take in a long breath, gas mask turning it into a deep sigh.

The image you have in your heart is a bright point on this dark side of the Earth, of clouds racing out and devouring the island. Of a blighted place too contaminated for anyone to set foot on it for generations, of albino fish and inside out birds hatched downwind. A monument to death and the dead, Geiger counters crackling and everyone in the world forced to deal with your choices long, long after you’re dead. It must be what the Boss feels like.

You draw your gun, returning to the moment. Lion rubs a hand across Sahelanthropus’ surface, paint flaking off. The vision you have of yourself plays out before you like a movie you could step into and fulfill at any time: you shoot her in the head, and it doesn’t hurt either of you. She won’t have to answer for your crimes, and she won’t get in your way of committing them.

Just as powerfully, you realize—you remember—you don’t know Lion. Your instinct says that it would be like putting down a dog. Maybe it’d even be the kind thing to do.

She doesn’t move from her spot on the bleached metal. There’s no way she doesn’t notice the gun in your hand.

“I’m not bringing Sahelanthropus home.” You flick the safety off. “I did the math. It’s not worth the grief.”

_“Grief is the business.”_

Like putting down a dog. A dog. You don’t holster your gun, but you cock your head. “You don't remember what the Boss said?”

It’s guessing, throwing a rock into a well, but you hear the satisfying plunk as Lion seems to zero in on you. _“The Boss?”_

“Yeah.” You even gesture a little with the gun, the way people move their hands when they’re speaking casually to a friend. “It was during the briefing, with Ocelot. He told us to leave it if we had to.” 

_“The Boss…”_ Lion says, slowly. Her eyes roam around the darkness, rifling through memories. _“Doesn’t want it?”_

“No. Ocelot wants it, but the Boss doesn’t.” The coldest part of you is noting her labored thinking, planting a piton in the mountain’s stone. She just wants to do what the Boss wants.

 _“He told you?”_ Lion briefly touches her forehead, rubs her knuckles over her right eyebrow. _“The Boss?”_

“Yeah, of course. You were in the room, you saw him talking to me. Your priority, the Boss said, is the kids. Sahelanthropus is just an asset. Doesn’t that sound like something the Boss would say?” You’re laying it on thick with a cement trowel, sealing Lion up in a wall with your lie. It’s not even hard. “You didn’t forget what the Boss said, did you?”

 _“No.”_ She doesn’t want to sound panicked, but you can hear it in the bass of her voice. She’ll do all the leg work for you. You had confused Lion as being your better instead of just your elder, when in truth you’re just seeing a primitive version of yourself. Ocelot had overdone whatever he did. _“What do we do?”_

_We._

Relief and the luxury of power let you move, breathe again. You can holster your gun, set the gears in motion. “Wallaby, what’s your security clearance?”

 _“Not as high as yours. Over?”_ She sounds distracted, too. Something is going on at home, but she wouldn’t tell you if you asked.

“You should stay off this line for a few minutes if you don’t want to be complicit in treason.”

_“Oh.”_

You kneel near Lion, trying to meet her at the same eye level. “We’re going to arm Sahelanthropus to self-destruct. Unless they removed the enrichment archaea injectors, the self-destruct sequence should be something we can trigger manually. Without power going to the other systems.” There would be more signs of deliberate removal if they had gotten at the injectors. They haven’t started stripping it down because they think they’re taking it away whole.

Your partner stands up. _“Okay.”_

“Keep a look out, I’ll go down.”

Lion throws you a two-fingered salute, and settles down against an outcropping of metal plating to watch the camp. It’s an easy, casual gesture like you aren’t asking her to cover you while you prepare the blow the both of you to hell. You want to say something like _I would’ve liked to get to know you better_ , or _Civet would like you, I think_ , but that seems overwrought.

Squirming into the open wound of Sahelanthropus, you try not to tear anything on the sharp metal. Parts and pipes are still hot as you squeeze closer to the interior workings of the central chassis. The injectors for the enrichment archaea were there, and as long as you could get power to them, it should spread through the enriched armor without any trouble. If given long enough, it’d probably catch to even the pieces of the machine that had been separated from it. 

You remember the injection mechanism being labeled as something different, like one of many proprioception modules. Disguised. The handwriting labeling it is not your own, you’ve never seen it, but you chase it. You can feel other parts of Sahelanthropus slipping away from you—the movement and coolant systems are harder to remember. It all looked the same on paper.

It’s a sealed white box when you find it, crammed up against what you might think of as the spine. You push with your back braced against a hundred other components to get space to breathe, to think, to look at it.

Your NVGs don’t offer any kind of depth perception, so you find yourself lowering your hands to the box, feeling it by touch. There’s a faint vibration inside it, and when you shove a hand behind it, a light reflects back on your glove. 

“Lion?”

_“Here.”_

“I found the injector module, and the power’s still good.” It was the only system in Sahelanthropus besides the navigation and AI brain stem that had an independent battery, unconnected from the rest of the machine’s power. Now you just have to crack it open. “Can I borrow your axe?”

_“No.”_

Probably for the best. You feel yourself overheating, cramped in this small space with nowhere to go. A metal box stuck between you and ending this. Your legs and back burn and you find yourself suddenly swarmed by images of being crushed in here, stuck in here. Too hot, too close, entombed forever.

For a moment, you stop being trained to deal with this and let yourself kick the box. It doesn’t do anything but leave some mud on the paint.

You know when you first see it that it’s just grime, but the sensation of being trapped inside Sahelanthropus—just like that woman, the woman on the tapes you weren’t supposed to hear, trapped in a machine—turns it into blood. Your mask is filling with it, you’re going to drown in it, the pipes will turn into hands and drag you down into the salt and you’ll stay here forever.

You kick it again to punctuate the snappish rejection of those histrionics. _Shut up._

The box springs open, lock mechanism spitting metal shards every which way.

 _“XOF are on alert.”_ Lion says it right before what chips and cracks of the outside night you can see turn a few shades lighter with more floodlights turning on. _“Heading this way.”_ The alarm that starts up is nasal and whooping, distorted by distance.

Inside the box is a fairly simple injector system. Several thick vials of what must be the enrichment archaea are visible, and there’s an easy to understand numbers pad to set the time of the injection, or detonation. Whichever is more convenient.

You hear the quiet scraping of Lion adjusting her position atop Sahelanthropus, somewhere above you. _“They’re inside the concertina.”_

“How long does it take us to get back to the beach for pickup?”

_“Fifteen minutes.”_

“Are you sure?”

 _“At a run.”_ You hear her shift around, make a discontented noise. _“Helicopters incoming. One’s put down near the beach.”_

You set the detonation time to twenty minutes, just to give yourself a little wiggle room. The injectors hiss right away, and you watch the plungers chase the archaea out of the tubes, presumably flooding channels in the main armor. The whole thing doesn’t suddenly creak and collapse around you, but you feel like you can smell something catalyzing through your mask. Hear a ticking noise. “Okay. Twenty minutes to get out of here before it goes off.”

Getting out of Sahelanthropus is worse than getting in, trying to retrace where you had squeezed and crawled in reverse. The allure of the night sky above you is undeniable, and although you know you still can’t take off your mask. 

Lion is waiting at the opening, hand outstretched to help haul you out of the wreckage. The XOF alarm is still going and you can hear choppers spinning up, but you put that out of your mind. Sahelanthropus creaks behind you like a one-note wail. Twenty minutes does not seem long enough. The two of you wordlessly slide and jump off the carnage, landing back on the earth.

She's hunched in the grass in front of you—the way you’d come in was the way the XOF soldiers were entering now, moving slowly and sweeping the tall grass in methodical beams of light. They knew you were here.

You move only when Lion does, following her lead explicitly through the chunks of machinery embedded in the grass. This is almost as bad as inside Sahelanthropus, being rabbits in the brush. Waiting for the moment they see you and open fire. It would be an instant death before the impending instant death you’d set for everyone on the island. Was that better, or worse?

That’s someone else’s fear. Maybe some part of you that you’d buried and now resurfacing, but it sounds like a scared child. You visualize kicking your boot at the anxiety. You’re going to die no matter what.

Lion is almost flat on the ground, having led you in a wide arc around the inside edge of the concertina wire. Ahead of you is a flashlight and a man behind it with a gun waiting for you. She lifts and aims and fires in the same motion, as natural as breathing or walking. The _phut_ sound seems like thunder to you, but none of the XOF men can look away from Sahelanthropus and its noises of increasing distress.

The gate guard starts to collapse when Lion moves, dark and fast like wind through the grass, her axe coming out and burying itself in the front of his neck and jaw, giving her a handle to lower him the rest of the way to the ground, quietly. The noises are like wet wood splitting.

She’s gone after that, and you scramble to keep up, not looking back at the field, the man, Sahelanthropus.

Lion moves quickly through the night, threading through the XOF camp. The klaxons are still going at full volume, covering the noise of your movement. Your body is a smoothly-running machine, carrying you across packed earth and gravel and muddy tire tracks.

It feels good to move with speed and clarity, although the rest of you knows the next choice is between trying to genuinely survive, and simply waiting for death. The camp flashes past in boxy tents and floodlights. “Wait.”

Lion ducks into the shadow of a materials container and looks back at you with clear upset—she said fifteen minutes, she’s trying to make it in fifteen minutes. The Boss didn’t tell her to die.

“Wait. Stop a minute.” You’re saying it without realizing it, eyes already fixed on the white fluorescent glow of the hazmat tent ahead.

_“No time.”_

“A kid’s in there.”

She nods immediately, switching positions to cover the entrance, and you know that she would stand there until Sahelanthropus detonates if you didn’t come back. The Boss said kids were the priority. You could laugh.

The dead XOF doctor is still there, and there’s another yellow hazmat suit furiously stuffing files and photographs into a document case. You get close enough to hear him cry out when he notices you, grabbing for a pistol on the desk, but you don’t have time for an interrogation. You put a round through his forehead with a hiss of escaping oxygen and kick over a box of supplies, looking for medical tape.

 _“What is it about your bad luck with hospitals?”_ Ocelot asks, which is wrong, because he’s been off the line for a while.

You can’t look at the small body on the operating table, but you can throw blue surgical gowns over him. More drapes. Make a bundle. Not a big one. The medical tape runs out quickly when you’re trying to hold the whole thing together, and you sob or something when you try to wedge your arms under it and the two halves bend in bad directions. The end of a metal clamp tears through the paper gowns and you can’t, you just can’t risk lifting it and it coming apart in your arms.

You secure the Fulton tracker device and make a few gulping noises trying to hail Wallaby. 

_“Moth, was that you? I—I’m still here. I know you said something about treason, but, you’re my responsibility, so—”_

“Wallaby, I’m Fultoning something home. I can’t leave him here.”

 _“Roger, Brass Moth.”_ There’s a pause, and she comes back ginger, trying to balance urgency with sensitivity. _“Is it a medical emergency? Over?”_

“Might be a contagion risk. Sorry.”

_“Ah, okay. Um, since this is an unorthodox mission, I’m sure Commander Miller will understand if we bend the rules a little.”_

You laugh and bump the back of your hand against your gas mask trying to wipe your nose, your mouth. The wormhole activates, nothing but campfire sparks and a bloody bundle of blue paper disappearing.

A helicopter makes a low pass outside and you throw yourself out of the tent, Lion intercepting and dragging you a few steps until you catch her pace. It’s a full out run through the camp, if anyone sees you, it doesn’t matter. The alarms are going, the helicopter’s light is roving the forest floor behind you, and the sounds of archaea collapse are louder and more frequent.

All you can think about is where he ended up. There’s a receiving area for extracted materials, personnel, everything. If a new recruit is putting up a fuss, they’ll let him sit there until the Boss extracts an animal or something, and watch an unhappy Russian deal with a hundred and eighty pounds of disconcerted sheep.

Lion leads you through the forest, tells you with her body when to stop and go, where to step and when to duck. You need it. All you can think about is that receiving area, and the blue surgical gowns. How long will he be left there? Who’s going to pick him up?

You almost crash into Lion’s back as she stops, hunches down near a tree trunk. There’s a XOF patrol heading this way from the beach, and you can hear another helicopter up ahead. Lion makes a _stay_ gesture and sneaks away from you, creeping around the approaching front of soldiers, positioning herself on the other side. It’d make for a good pincer attack if necessary.

Low to the ground like you are, they look taller. Like you remember adults looking, when you were a child.

The hair on the back of your neck stands up. There’s a strange heavy air pressure before a storm. Something detonates in the camp behind you, maybe on Lion’s command, and all the lights jerk over to train on that noise and light. You try to count how many there are, but you keep losing track and starting over. All you can see is the one closest to you, all you can feel is the weight of your rifle in your hands. The suppressor’s still fresh. You can do whatever you want as long as they don’t see you.

You take a deep breath in, hearing the draw of air over your open mouth. The first shot must hit some kind of oxygen tank or an explosive, because as soon as you squeeze the trigger, the XOF soldier bursts into flame.

He lights up the night with sudden orange and yellow, and you feel for a moment like a big cat in an old poem, certain the fire must glitter when it hits you, painting one side of you hot while the rest is darkness.

The last breath escaped you when you weren’t watching, so you take another one in. Slow and steady. A man with a patch on his vest steps forward with a side arm to put burning man out of his misery, so you take him next. Another bloom of flame.

 _“Moth?”_ Lion asks, somewhere on their other side, invisible in the night.

You can’t answer, you need another breath in. The XOF force is starting to shout and move more aggressively into the bushes, so you switch to automatic fire and stop thinking. Your muzzle flash gets lost as they all erupt into fire.

You can hear a chopper overhead, you hope you see it. As soon as you can get your sights on it, it’s yours. They’re all yours, every miserable life on this island is yours to take and it still won’t equal out to what was lost. Nothing will ever make it right, but nothing will ever make this place right again after you’re done with it. Not God or XOF or the Boss or even nature. 

The temptation is to wade into the fire. You know in your heart you would survive it. To stay here and burn the whole island until the nuke goes off, and you won’t have to face living this way.

Lion grabs your shoulder from the darkness with shocking strength, knocking you back a step. _“Back to the beach. Come on, both of you.”_

Your eyes are streaming from the smoke, leaving itching tracks down your face. XOF bodies go off like firecrackers as the fire eats through stored magazines, shells cooking off. “What’d you say?”

 _“The Boss gave us priorities.”_ Lion doesn’t wait, and you put the heat of the growing fire to your back. Maybe she’s having some kind of flashback.

Even the hot island air is further thickened by burning vegetation. Your scalp is cold under a layer of evaporating sweat, leaves and branches dragging at every part of you like fingers as you run. Lion isn’t worried about stealth anymore, and you can’t stop to check the timer on your iDroid.

There’s a bigger cry of bending metal, something, another explosion. Sahelanthropus is changing faster and faster. Lion lunges back and grabs your hand, dragging you over fallen trees and rocks, even clearing one of the pit traps. Everything feels downhill.

When you hit the sand, your legs want to fly out from underneath you. The smell of the lake is back in full force, the night sky dark blue stretching into black. Stars are visible overhead even with the floodlights of the camp, with the burning of the forest.

Lion isn’t stopping, pulling you into the lake. You can hear her breathing over the radio and in your ear, tight and deep breathes. Not ragged panting, but the gas mask is making it hard to do anything. Another explosion from the camp, and you slap at your iDroid, gasping. It’s habit that makes you go on, and you don’t fight it. “Support—Wallaby—we have to get out. Now. Immediate extraction. Now, now.”

_“Acknowledged, Jeroboam will—”_

Wallaby’s babbling about coordinates when Lion stops, looking back at the approaching searchlight of the helicopter, a circle of blinding white sand and blue water. _“Forget it. Wormhole.”_

Cargo and unmoving bodies? You’re neither. Whatever. The lake water sloshes into your boots as you misstep, sinking down into the salt. You should fight her, die with your decision.

Lion slams a wormhole device on your chest, taking your other hand and pinning it there just in case. _“Almost home.”_

Radiation poisoning would cloud the whole area, poison the lake and the land for miles around. Is Jeroboam far enough away to survive? A spotlight flashes over you, white sand and white water.

Lion holds your mask to your face as she wrestles you down, grabs you with her whole body, hunches the both of you into the warm water as the helicopter sprays machinegun fire. You can hear and feel the nearby impact like slaps along your whole body.

Not even that matters for a moment as you squeeze your eyes closed, the sun rising suddenly behind you. It can’t get any brighter when its noon at your back, but it does, your shut eyes doing nothing to keep it out. Lion’s radio signal is dead in your ear. The orange light of the wormhole doesn’t make it to you, but the reversal of gravity does, just as the beach whips sand across you in a stinging wave. 

It breathes you in along with the lake water, and the beginning force of the nuclear blast tears the sole off your boot as it passes through the wormhole.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 😬


	6. CIVET

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're back!

**CIVET**

**FINDING EXTREME PLEASURE WILL MAKE YOU A BETTER PERSON**

**IF YOU'RE CAREFUL ABOUT WHAT THRILLS YOU**

  
  
  
  


The heaviest guard presence is around one of the storage rooms, a thick-walled dead-end, and you and Eagle silently agree to lose patience and go all out—if the silenced rounds of your guns alert the rest of the base, whatever. He’s wound up a little tight, and you hate knowing that Snake is somewhere in the base, off your radar and out of your sight. 

You’re still thinking about that when Eagle loses patience with the lock and brute-forces his way into the glorified tool closet, darting in and leaving you to keep your back against the inside doorframe, torn between keeping watch and staring at the tableau left inside. 

It’s just Venom, but there’s a light or an intensity to the room that makes it into something more, something like a movie or a bad dream. He’s just sitting in a chair, tied up and out of it. Meat. There’s a chainlink cage in the center of the room, set into the concrete, and Eagle snips a few links with a wirecutter and tears his way in. 

Venom sags against the restraints and you feel a guilt that makes you nauseous—that he’s here like this, and that inside you is a small candle of disgust for his weakness in this moment. The way he doesn’t look like Big Boss.

Eagle kneels in front of him, very gently using both hands to touch his face, lift open an eyelid, check his breathing. “Civ, get his hands.”

They used tie wraps underneath the cuffs, like he’d be able to break through either just on the sheer power of being Big Boss. You can imagine Snake sneering. _Fat chance_. You saw through the plastic and pick the cheap cuffs, tossing the detritus away. The fingers of his mechanical hand are smashed, like they hadn’t wanted to take the time to figure out how to take it off and just took a hammer to it instead. 

Hopefully Eagle packed a spare. You didn’t. You hadn’t let yourself think very much about the Boss at all—and you should’ve, you know, from the moment you lifted off with Pequod your whole being should have narrowed down to the hunt for the Boss. It could happen, it had happened. You had once pursued him to the point of treason. 

What had happened to that version of you? You watch Eagle shake and ease Venom out of some kind of deep stupor, stick him with some adrenaline, talking him through the whole thing. Why didn’t you feel love and relief and anxiety, seeing him here like this, slushy from sedatives and letting Eagle take care of him? 

You distract yourself, look around the bare room like there’s anything to learn from it. Just old concrete. The cage, probably repurposed from tool storage or something. If you grabbed the chainlink and shook, it would probably release a lattice of dust. 

Eagle’s saying something to Venom, and you resist the urge to physically plug your ears. _Come on, then, I know I don’t have to tell you, Boss, it’s time to go home. Come on and wake up. There we go. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Follow my finger. I’m not trained for this, I’m just doin’ it like the movies._ It’s like seeing someone naked without meaning to, and you don’t want to be here. 

Venom takes in a deep breath and surfaces out of somewhere else, standing up straight one joint at a time until he has his full height, and you realize you’ve never really seen him at his peak, in his element. Is this it? What does it look like? Why aren’t you filled with hope?

“Boss,” Eagle says, quietly and with an easy adoration. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

Venom extends a hand and pulls the other man up from his kneel. “Eagle. It’s been a while.”

Your partner gives him a now-familiar look, as if he can’t tell if Venom’s joking. There’s some kind of story there, but you just stand up straight and try not to look guilty of thought crimes when Venom finally turns to you. “Where’s Snake?”

“He… we split up.” You can’t or won’t look directly at him. “I didn’t think it was ob--”

“His smell.” Venom says everything like a gentle fact. “And you’re rattled.” 

“I am not.”

“Boss, we might want to move on outta here quickly.” Whether or not Eagle’s fishing for more attention or just saving you from further scrutiny, it doesn’t matter. He’s right. “Unless you got any unfinished business…?”

“No. Getting out is the priority. We’ll deal with everything else later.” His ruined mechanical hand lands on your shoulder like a squashed insect. “Alright?”

You nod, suitably cowed, pull away to drag the guards inside and strip them of armor, side arms, anything useful. Eagle does have a spare hand for Venom and puts it on, a tiny screwdriver held in his mouth while he works. You have the impression it’s supposed to be easy to replace and some of the damage done is making that harder. 

None of the guards’ armor really fits the Boss, but he handles the guns easily. Familiar, checking ammo, testing the safety, automatic in the same way it is for you. Some of that tension is starting to ease. He’s your Boss—you don’t have to worship him. You can accept that he’s the same as you, that he’s different from Snake. For the better. You had loved that about him. That had saved you once.

The difference once in motion is better only because it becomes so obvious. There isn’t the same weight to moving with Venom as there is with Snake, gravity doesn’t warp around him and put you in an orbit when you wish it would. 

The base is a labyrinth, and you take a wrong turn and pick your way into an old XO’s office instead of the eastern corridor you’d been hoping for. Venom doesn’t say anything, but he stops you from shutting the door and moves in. 

The office is trashed—papers everywhere, a phone off the hook, a lamp smashed, but it doesn’t look like a fight scene. It looks like a lost temper. You’re an expert. 

“These are all old papers, Boss,” Eagle toes through them. “Some datin’ back to the sixties.”

“It must’ve been a fallout shelter, before Cipher repurposed it.” Venom stops, looking at an old map, framed on the wall. You don’t recognize the area, but the key labels it as Tselinoyarsk. You’re sure Ocelot’s mentioned that before, but you can’t place the significance. 

“Who puts a map under glass?” Eagle mutters, tapping a nail on it as he shuffles past, still looking over papers. “Think this’s a dead end, Boss, we might as well go.”

You can see the wheels turning in Venom’s head, but he still looks away, continues on. “Yeah.” 

He’s the last to leave, and he doesn’t shut the door behind him.

The halls should be more full of guards and at this point you should’ve gotten into at least one dicey shoot-out, but it’s still quiet. Eagle metaphorically has his ears strained for how Venom wants to play every situation, and you’d despise it if you weren’t doing the same. He’s as quiet as Snake, but more patient. The legend about him spending three days in a dumpster is probably true. 

Dirty sunlight filters in through a long, milky slit of a window facing out into the desert and a staging area. A couple of jeeps, a couple of guards smoking. The light is white and revealing after the long and musty hallways, and you put your back to it and rub your eyes. 

Eagle hasn’t taken his eyes off the window, looking out, pupils pinpricks. He’ll figure out a good path, lead Venom and you out of here. The adrenaline is starting to drain out of you, and you want to be out of here, away from both of them, home. 

“Oh, you son of a bitch.” Eagle sighs forlornly, and you risk peeking up over the edge as well. It takes you a moment, before Venom murmurs _west barricade, the alarm_ , and you see a heat shimmer in the late afternoon shade slinking fast and stubborn to the inner side of the barricade framing the outer perimeter of the base.

The parasite suit. Both you and Eagle look at Venom, who watches calmly as Snake yanks the alarm, starting an old siren throughout the whole base, every soldier within visible distance suddenly jerking into action. 

Eagle checks the safety on his M14, sullenly. “ _Boss_.”

Venom shrugs. 

The dicey shoot-out starts as soon as you turn a corner, and everything else shuts up. You don’t have to worry about Venom or Eagle, focus narrowed down to your sights and the placement of your body and your boots and when you need to reload. 

Soaking in adrenaline again, moving through the base behind corners and barrels and waiting for Eagle to signal you ahead, it gets easier. You don’t think about Snake at all. 

The first shriek of rusted hinges and hiss of sunshine makes you flinch out of it, briefly, disoriented to be under the sky and Eagle has to yank you down behind a container before automatic fire takes off the top of your head. 

“Boss, you see that jeep?” Eagle asks, not tightly but not relaxed. You can’t tell if he’s enjoying himself. “We could haul ass to the beach, call Pequod in.”

Venom’s focus is in the middle distance, but he’s present. All your gear feels heavy and hot and there’s some shaking in the long muscles of your thighs. How long has this taken? “I’ll cover you. Civet, take right.”

“Does he have keys, or are we gonna sit here while he--” You’re not so churlish as to keep complaining as you hear the jeep’s engine start, the tires snarl, bullets pinging off the armored sides.

Something about Eagle's hotwiring skills clicks into place as you as rubber burns and the jeep practically writhes in place, building up annoyed speed as Venom vaults into the driver’s seat and you spring into the back, knocking your face against a hot vinyl seat as the jeep races forward. 

He _drives_ , and you know you need to brace against something and try to provide cover fire, but even Venom is holding on for dear life, the three of you bouncing, snapping your teeth together on impact and leaning against tight turns. The hot, dry air snatches at your face and you put your back to the wind and focus on keeping an eye on your six, at the rapidly shrinking base. 

“Eagle,” Venom says, as a warning, and then again, louder to be heard over the engine shifting into a gear you’re not sure it was made to be in at this speed or angle. “Don’t!”

“Don't what?” Eagle shouts back, hair whipping furiously, teeth showing in a grin. “Can’t hear you, Boss! Hold on!” 

The jeep clears the crest of the hill and you leave your stomach there, the jeep plunging and physically screaming down the other side of the hill, almost loud enough to drown out the sound of rotors. Looking up, it’s not Pequod, but a black XOF chopper, and you yell a wordless warning. 

“Eagle,” Venom shouts, and you can’t see but somehow you know he’s right in the other man’s ear. “Get out of the hills!” 

You’ve got to make life hard for the XOF gunner while Eagle slams and wrenches the gearstick in a complex pattern of lurching, and you feel yourself flushed and embarrassed to be missing the XOF helicopter at this range, but it’s like being a a fucking carnival ride with no seatbelts. Your sense of direction is garbage and you’re not sure you’re headed towards the beach anymore, moreso just anywhere that isn’t mostly vertical. 

Eagle hits every rock and pothole and the relief of the jeep rivals your own when the ground finally levels out, and you can actually draw a bead again, until Eagle starts doing some unaccountable things with the handbrake, Venom grabbing you at one point to keep you in the seat. 

“Would love a plan of action, Boss!” Eagle hollers, picking up speed again and rattling your teeth as a line of machine gun fire crawls up the desert alongside the jeep. 

“Switch places, Civet,” Venom mostly hauls you where he wants you, and you gratefully wind a seatbelt around your arm in the passenger seat. Packing materials fly out of the jeep as Venom looks for something in the cargo, and you try to focus on the black dragonfly of the chopper. It can wheel and turn to keep up with Eagle, but the gunner can’t, not in a way that matters. Errant shots smack into the jeep and even tear stuffing out of the seats, but somehow being shotgun is more manageable than the back, and you frost the pilot’s windshield with bulletholes. 

Venom scares the shit out of you, leveling an enormous cannon of some kind and resting it on your shoulder, swiveling to track something on the horizon over the shattered edge of the windscreen. “Ears, Civet!”

You clap your hands over them but still feel the _whumpf_ in the hollow of your chest, everything sounding a bit more cottony as Venom tosses the cannon away, out of the jeep. Eagle bounces over an errant rock and doubles back into his own trail of white dust, and you spit angrily. 

“That rock!” Venom points over Eagle’s shoulder, mechanical finger a perfectly straight line. “Full speed!”

“Boss!” Eagle sounds scandalized, and Venom surprises you by grabbing Eagle’s head and giving him what you can only parse as an encouraging shake. Eagle laughs and throws the jeep into a groaning donut, XOF bullets kicking more dust up where you’d just been. 

You know his foot is all the way to the floor, the jeep straining flat-out and picking up speed. He can’t do as many loops and slides to keep the XOF gunner guessing, and you hear it on the Jeep, more shots connecting. Something pierces the hood and the engine takes on a new sound, the jeep swerving and Eagle’s full weight going into holding the steering wheel captive. Straight on. Towards the rock, the boulder Venom had marked, half the size of the jeep. 

_Sir!_ You yell, to no one, because Venom isn’t listening, Venom is making Eagle’s life complicated by attaching a cargo Fulton to the steering wheel, Eagle cursing with the speed and intensity of an auctioneer. The rock is still there and only getting closer. Something in the jeep busts and blue smoke spurts out.

“Trust me,” Venom shouts, one hand on the wheel over Eagle’s, the other gripping a wormhole remote, and you are too dignified to scream as the rock ignites in a fiery, perfect circle at an angle you’ve never seen before, pure, dark blue. 

Instinct makes Eagle tap the brakes and the jeep throws itself forward into the wormhole, bumper and wheel sheared off as it passes through at an angle, and you lift out of your seat from the impact, the drop into ocean air, into the familiar airspace of Mother Base, all the way in Seychelles. 

Venom kicks the Fulton package and the whole jeep underneath you bucks up, pitching dangerously as the balloon deploys. The steering column groans with effort and implied flashes of platform, ocean, platform, ocean whip past, balloon struggling with the momentum of the vehicle. 

You see Eagle nodding in his seat, nose bleeding from smashing into the steering wheel, and Venom reaches around your body, deftly snagging an instrument out of your uniform that you hadn’t noticed Requisitions loading you down with, tosses it out of the jeep before climbing towards Eagle. “Get ready, Civet.”

Wind grabs at your hair and you know it’ll only be a matter of seconds before the Fulton kicks into second gear and tries to make it to high altitude. “What?”

“We’re jumping.” Eagle lolls around hefted over Venom’s shoulder, one boot braced on the side of the jeep, other hand gesturing for you. “Hold on to me.”

You don’t think about it, just find purchase in his fatigues and hold on as Venom leaps into space, one final rend of metal from the jeep as the steering column and some other structural elements careen into the sky, the rest of the jeep falling almost at your own rate. You see the broken glass spraying out. 

Below you can actually hear the activation beep and pressurized air releasing as Venom activates the decoy, vinyl breaking your fall instead of asphalt, and the three of you bounce to the side in a tangle of limbs. The decoy bursts on impact, but as you lay there spinning and stunned, you can still hear the speaker manage a _Kept you waiting, huh_? 

Eagle snorts, chokes, hacks and spits as he tries to sit up with Venom’s arm still curled around him. “What—gh—what’d I miss?” The corpse of the jeep crashes into something on the way down and hits the water, out of sight.

You wouldn’t mind if the Boss just kept holding the both of you, laying flat on the platform and looking up at the dark Seychelles night. Patting around your own chest until you find his hand and grip it, panting. “Again, Boss.”

“Once was enough.”

“Eagle?”

Your partner does some determined blinking, craning around. “Where’s the car?” 

Diamond Dogs rush up, clamoring around the Boss and hauling you upright, all talking at once and you double over, trying to settle your equilibrium. 

“Radio Pequod, get him home,” the Boss is telling someone. “Tell him sorry he missed the party.”

Eagle hocks phlegm and blood and you reach out to grab at his uniform. “If you… ever drive me… anywhere, again--” You can’t quite connect, so Eagle grabs your hand and guides you to his collar, wearily. 

“Sir!” Running Serpent shoves Raptor aside and almost over you entirely, high voice cutting through some of the confused and hopeful chatter. “Sir! Sir, I’m sorry, I know you just got back, I’m so glad to see you’re alive, also, that’s great—”

“Serpent.”

“The Major! Is on his way to the brig, they took—the other away team there, and the Commander’s missing, and we could really use your help, Boss—” Serpent’s desperation seems like it’s jangling them more than the crowd pressing in, and you watch enviously as the Boss puts a hand on her shoulder, seriously. Like he didn’t just drive you into a rock and into mid-air.

“You have me. What’s going on?”

“Alright, clear out,” Eagle says, suddenly standing upright with a presence and vigor you don’t associate with him, using a loud voice and an officer’s tone. “This is Boss business, back to your posts. Can’t barely breathe with y’all like this.” There are some _who are yous?_ and _hey, c’mon, it’s the bosses_ but he’s got a kind of authority that sends most of them back to their posts, leaving Serpent space to tremble. 

“Sir, there was… a saboteur. Some Cipher agent got onto Mother Base—the Ocelot Squad got him, he’s in the brig, the Major’s on his way over now, but I-- I’m not even sure I’m supposed to know that.” She flushes in embarrassment. “So what-- what are we supposed to do?”

They got the saboteur you'd been sent to hunt? You rankle and then try to ignore it, watch the Boss. He’s got a hell of a poker face, but you know what he looks like thinking, processing a lot of information. 

The rudimentary prosthetic tightens on Serpent’s shoulder, and the enormity of being the Boss’s center of attention seems to hit her all at once. “You’ve done a good job. Get these two to the Medical platform. Leave the rest to me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Any fic author after chapter 1 can't update regularly... all they know is lurk, stare at gdocs, eat hot chip and lie


	7. MOTH

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two? Two frequent updates in a row? Are we sure?

**MOTH**

  
  


**WITH ALL THE HOLES IN YOU ALREADY THERE'S NO REASON**

**TO DEFINE THE OUTSIDE ENVIRONMENT AS ALIEN**

  
  
  


The brig is a cold and lonely place normally, and despite all your transgressions, you don’t normally end up here. You’re used to the stifling comforts of a room on the Medical platform with guards posted outside.

Everything about it should set off all your old alarms for being in trouble. The heavy silence of metal walls deep inside a platform, how it had been at least an hour since you’d seen anyone else. Lion is theoretically in a nearby cell, but you don’t want to be heard calling to her. But in the same way you aren’t worried for her, you don’t feel the guilt or fear of being _in trouble_. 

Coming out of the wormhole with the force normally reserved for shipping containers and mortars had been about what you’d expected. Immediately being sprayed with disinfectant from all angles had been a surprise, and getting help sawing Lion’s boots off before they finished melting to her skin had been a warmest part of the welcome. After that it’d been the kind of secret police roughhousing that the regular Ocelot Units relished, stripping off kit and the clammy NBC suit and back down to your underthings and bareness with a violence that should have scared you. But it doesn’t. Not the treatment, not the cell, it’s elementary math after being fed calculus. 

Revolver Ocelot is going to kill you.

Not in the regular people way of saying he’s mad, he’s mad as hell and you’re going to be scrubbing rust for the rest of your life, but in the actual way. He might interrogate you before he does it just to find out where he went wrong, but at the end of it is eventual death. It probably would’ve been cleaner to stay on the island. 

Your hearing is too good and the cells aren’t sound-proofed. Even if all you had were the vibrations through the floor, you would know Kaz’s gait. How he sounds when he’s in a hurry, when the prosthetic’s heel drags and how he doesn’t have time to stop and correct it. Would a Diamond Dog stand at attention for him, even in the brig?

He stops in front of your cell, inevitably. Hisses in through the tiny window. “Moth.”

“You shouldn’t be here, sir.”

“It’s still my base, I can go where I want.” You can’t see him through the window, but his silhouette is enough to keep you sitting. Cowed. He’s breathing hard, like he pushed himself to get here quickly. Swallowing a lot. “Tell me the truth. Did you detonate Sahelanthropus?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“On Ocelot’s orders?”

“Against them, sir.”

Kaz makes an impatient noise. “No—really _think_ about it. He can make you do anything he wants, did he order you to blow it up?”

That maybe hurts worse than anything he’s ever said to you. “Is that really what you think of me?” 

He doesn’t answer. 

The steel wire that you had counted on since Ibiza, since you became Brass Moth in the ways that mattered, is close to snapping. Pulled so tight within you that it hums. You want to tell him, to explain that they were children, they were kids, that nothing on that island deserves to live after what happened there, that if you’d been thinking straight you would’ve sent Lion back and stayed to die there with everything else. 

The cell door’s locking mechanism makes a rejection tone once, then twice before Kaz slams a hand into it. Harder than he should, considering he’s just got the one left. “Venom’s on his way. Don’t give up. That’s an order.”

If the Boss is alive, then Civet’s chances are good, having been on that rescue mission. It’s a nice thought.

Kaz retreats from the door’s window as you hear Ocelot’s heels in the hall outside. The big, theatric pace of the Major mad and in a hurry. “We’ve got that Cipher agent for you to play with. Go blow off some steam and get out from underfoot.”

“I won’t let you kill them without a trial.”

“Aren’t you embarrassed to act this way, Miller?” Ocelot’s spurs chime and you feel as well as hear Kaz crash into the opposing bank of cells. “I’ll make you another one, if that’s what you’re fussin’ about.”

He dissolves into cursing and the sounds of struggle, intensified as you hear his crutch yelps under pressure and clatters down the hallway. Ocelot opens your cell without any preamble and lets himself in. The door swings behind him but doesn’t shut all the way, although you can’t imagine yourself trying to run.

The Major is a vision in red, fevered. There should be a luxury in his movements that isn’t there, half of all his minds are somewhere else, preoccupied. He just stands there, looking more and more human by the second. Decaying in real time. His hands open and close once: he’s not sure what he wants to do to you first. 

You move at the same time, rushing each other like lovers. His limbs and yours get tangled up, independently trying to get the upper hand in a grapple that only lasts long enough for him to sneer at you. “You picked a fine time to become interesting, Moth.”

You aren’t pretending to be Civet when you lunge for his neck, and you’re proud in a distant way that it’s all you. The desperation and fury races up from your heart and into your throat and your head jerks forward and you get an even split of skin and scarf in your mouth. 

There’s blood in your teeth when he gets you off of him with a sharp, puncturing strike under your ribs, but you know what internal damage feels like, and you’re fine. Ocelot’s too fast drawing his revolvers for you to stop him, but the cell is small enough he has to calculate ricochet. Maybe if you’d given him the half breath it takes for him to account for the geometry, he could’ve killed you with a fancy trick shot. 

You launch yourself at him without any grace or balance, and there’s no technique for him to anticipate or counter. A Tornado clatters away out of reach on the floor and Ocelot’s free hand grabs you by the scalp and drags up, back, but you have no one to look pretty for, and you let him rip out some hair. Skin goes with it, turf uprooting. No one’s touched you with intent like this in so long that it feels good. Maybe that’s something Civet infected you with. You used to be nice. 

His fingers are still tangled when you bring your forehead crashing down on his, on the bridge of his nose. Maybe you’ll make him so ugly that his Boss won’t want him anymore, either. The one that he tried to give Civet to, the one that ruined everything. 

You seize on that just in time for your Boss to wrench the two of you apart, sending you ass over heels into the cell wall. Venom has to use his whole body to push Ocelot back and up and to his feet so they can look at each other. Two animals too big for this small space. Kaz is struggling around outside. 

“That’s enough.” The Boss puts his body in front of yours, but stays within grabbing distance of Ocelot. He looks bigger than he ever has to you before, even just in fatigues. Caked with unfamiliar desert and stripped of armor. Ocelot’s the only one with a gun in the room. “This can be settled later.”

“If any of them break, it’s on me. Isn’t that what you said?” Ocelot smiles tersely, eyes narrowing briefly. His focus is entirely on Venom, blood bright on his face from his nose. “I’m cleaning up after myself.”

“I want you to return to Command. We need you there to coordinate the evacuation.”

“Of course, Boss, whatever you’d like. But this is a matter of professionalism.” He sounds so reasonable and calm that you want to agree with him. 

“No.”

All the affability falls out of Ocelot at once. “I made Moth. I retain the right to unmake them.”

Venom steps back towards you, one hand reaching out to grab yours, hauling you upright. He lets go like he knows he’ll need both hands free for Ocelot. “That wasn’t a request. Go back to Command, now.” 

“I made you, too,” Ocelot says softly. No one moves but him, only noise the Tornado’s hammer pulling back. It peels back the silence to reveal something raw and terrible. You can’t get between them fast enough if he wants to shoot Venom, if he wants—

“The Boss said to go back to Command,” Lion reminds him from the cell’s doorway, and the light catches on Ocelot’s hair as he turns quickly, too quickly, startled. She has Kaz’s sidearm, the one you’ve cleaned and reassembled so many times, and it is leveled at Ocelot and the safety is already off. “The Boss gave you an order.”

Ocelot’s face goes flat and blank in the way that signals his momentary resignation. “Miller.”

“I hope she shoots you anyway,” Kaz says from outside. 

Venom gestures you out of the cell and you go, moving past Lion carefully. She doesn’t seem to notice you, or the Boss, or anything other than Ocelot. You see Kaz slumped up against the wall, his crutch bent. You don’t know where to go or what to look at, so you just stand outside the door and listen. The other Tornado is either thrown or wrenched to the floor.

“You can stay until we’ve made it to Galzburg, or you can leave right now. Whatever you want to do. You don’t need my permission, but you have it.”

“How magnanimous of you, Boss.”

There’s the scrape of his boots on the floor and a dull thud, and you see Lion’s arm move, magnetized to Ocelot’s position. Sneaking a glance around her, you see him against the wall, something different in Venom’s posture as he holds him there. You shudder as he finally starts speaking Ocelot’s language.

“If they’re faulty, it’s my decision when they’re retired.” 

“Disobeying direct orders goes a bit beyond—” Ocelot starts and stops with a dry gurgle as a forearm presses again his throat.

“You gave them to me instead of giving yourself, Adam.”

The brief bell-like noise of the spurs. Ocelot’s hands striking and gripping Venom once as exploration, then again in distress. Kaz’s face across the hall is sweaty and frozen, locked in place by the sounds of Big Boss. 

“I’d rather see you leave on good terms than die at your post over this. It’s not your style.”

Ocelot’s breathing hard when you hear him again, voice hoarse. “Alright, Boss.” Boots squeaking briefly, like he’s making contact with the floor again. “I don’t leave a job half-finished. I’ll see you settled in at Outer Heaven.”

Things dissolve from there. You see rather than hear Lion dismissed from the room, shying away from the Boss like standing in his presence hurts. She hides behind thick hair thick tangled with disinfectant, her bare feet scorched and runny, and kneels beside Kaz to present his sidearm back to him. Ocelot and Venom are still talking inside the cell, but you don’t want to look in there. Don’t want to hear it. 

Lion pries Kaz off the floor in your periphery. “What’re you doing down there, Commander?”

“Taking a nap. Get my fucking crutch.”

“Armadillo hits hard, huh.”

“What?” He shoves her away with a look, holstering his gun and trying to regain balance. “Report to Medical and get cleaned up. Civet and Eagle are already there, you’ll rejoin them.”

“What’s going on, sir?” Lion says it mildly, like there’s been a change in the cafeteria menu. You wonder what she thinks is happening around her. You wonder why you think you’re handling it any better.

Kaz is silent, braced against the bent crutch, and you want to beg him to tell you what to do, how you can fix this for him. The sense of loss radiating from him is heavy—if you couldn’t hear the Boss quietly talking as an equal with Ocelot, you’d be worried about him, too. Something is truly wrong.

“Does it…” He looks at you sharply when you speak, even though you're only trying to give him some kind of handhold. “Is it about what the Boss said? Evacuation? Sir?”

Every word for him must taste bitter. “A Cipher saboteur… made it on base. Ocelot picked up outgoing comms, and we know they’re scrambling for an attack. We’re relocating to a secure position in South Africa.”

“We aren’t going to fight?” You think about all the AA gun placements, the Security measures, the drills. “Isn’t that what we—”

“We left the saboteur alone for too long, there’s no way there aren’t structural explosives in place. If there’s a chance they could just blow Mother Base out from under us, I won’t risk leaving men to die in the middle of the ocean.” He doesn’t have to raise his voice to cut off your arguments—this is clearly something he’s screamed at himself to get to the point where he can say it with only a shaking voice. “Again. The Boss agrees.”

“The inspection,” Lion says, solemnly, inscrutably. Kaz looks at her with an expression of pain and disgust, but eventually presses his mouth shut and just nods. 

“Sure, Lion. We failed the inspection.”

Kaz looks as if his greatcoat is the thing holding him up, the collar and shoulders still crisp and strong where the rest of him is wilting before you. His hand on the crutch is the only tension left in his body, the rest of him hanging there like a ghost. 

“Just go to Medical. We’ll contact you there.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Civet and Eagle are waiting for you on one of the Med platform’s larger shower units, one with benches for accessibility.

The whole platform is down to auxiliary power, all nonessential outer lights dimmed for stealth and Diamond Dogs coursing to and fro like glittering rivers under the stars. It’s loud outside, a lot of shouting and the feeling of strictly, barely contained panic. Mother Base is gritting its teeth and bleeding out through wormholes—that’s one light that never dims, you see the big transmitter stations humming orange and belching sparks almost constantly. 

Screaming Wallaby drives the two of you to Medical, explaining in between huge intakes of air. Like she’s swimming, surfacing before plunging again. 

A saboteur, some kind of Cipher agent, had made it onto Mother Base, and there was no way that the rest of XOF wasn’t mobilizing. That was why there had been a skeleton crew on the island: they were all mustering to come here. 

But, Wallaby says, yanking on the handbrake as she turned loudly around a stack of shipping containers, there was a backup plan. There was another base, one they could relocate to, until Mother Base was safe again. It’s in South Africa somewhere, everything not nailed down is being shoved through wormholes and it’ll all be there. 

You look over at Lion to see what she thinks of that, but her nose is to the wind and her gaze out over the dark ocean. _Until Mother Base was safe again_ had the same taste in your mouth as _We sent the dog to live on a farm_.

Wallaby speeds off once she’d dropped you at the rendezvous, already on the radio again for orders. Lion continues into the showers ahead of you, walking slow on painful feet. 

Out of the darkness inside Civet practically runs up to you, half out of fatigues and looking stretched at the seams with emotion, electric with feeling. And they stop there for a moment, like they’re waiting for permission, searching your face for something, and they grab you in an embrace that knocks your teeth together and threatens to make your knees buckle from relief. You shut your eyes against the dim red lights in the shower and smell their sweat, lock your legs and prop up against them. 

“Took you long enough,” Civet sounds as tightly wound as they always are. “Where were you?”

“An island.” A tent. A cell. You feel a bone deep fatigue threatening to set in, and try to force yourself to move against the bars of Civet’s arms. 

They pull away almost immediately and search your face again, peering and not making it subtle. “What happened?”

“Ask me later.”

They start dragging you towards the shower, out of your shapeless coverall, turning on the shower sprays. If you don’t start moving with some life, they’ll scrub you themselves, which you want and fear for how much you want it.

It helps that Eagle’s doing the same for Lion, albeit in slow motion compared to Civet’s energy. You don’t mean to stare at them, and you don’t mean to ignore Eagle, but Lion is impossible not to drink in. Her body is strong and luxurious in a way you feel like you’ve never seen before, creased and whitened with scar tissue of a very long and eventful life. Eagle’s dog tags jingle as he kneels in front of her, holding her foot as gently as if it were a glass slipper. He whistles, and it rolls around the tiled room. “Looks nasty, lady.” 

“A nuke went off.”

“No shit?” 

The shower spray seems to shut everything else out, closing the four of you in water that’s not hot enough to truly unwind muscle. None of you need to be that relaxed, and you’d scour yourself with freezing water if you could. Sweat and dried disinfectant churns off you underneath Civet’s hands, and you try to reciprocate, but you can’t keep up. Can’t focus. 

Outside, your home is being dissembled and shipped away to Outer Heaven. But the struts will stay here, so will it really be home? If you replace every part of your body, is it still your body?

“Here, now,” Eagle’s voice is just as big and unfamiliar as his hand is, planted right between your shoulder blades. “You’re missin’ their whole back, Civ.”

You want to feel more possessive of your body, but Eagle doesn’t register as a threat in a meaningful way. The four of you smell the same under the water, even sound the same, water running over lips. He’s very gentle, moreso than when he reaches over the top of you to slap a palmful of shampoo into Civet’s scalp, setting them snarling like a firecracker. 

It’s hard not to feel jealous, the way their adventure seems to have sharpened them somehow, laced them up tighter to Eagle. Lion is standing under a shower jet like a rock under a waterfall and you can’t say you feel particularly close to her, even after being her partner. Hadn’t you even been prepared to put her down?

“Lion,” you say, water hanging heavy on your eyelashes and running metallic over your mouth. “Can I wash your hair for you?”

She stares at you, blank in the dark, and Eagle moves your hands to her scalp for you. No shampoo, he murmurs, she doesn’t like the smell. 

Her hair is thick between your fingers and her skull is stone. Steady. She watches you with a predatory intensity and disinterest: there is nothing you could do to her at this range that she wouldn’t do worse to you. 

It’s gone after a moment, softened back into thousand-yard, harmlessly absent look, and you let out a breath you hadn’t realized you were holding. “You’re a good partner, Lion. Thank you.”

“You knew what the Boss wanted,” Lion replies, her voice low and snagged with disuse. The radio had filtered out all the nuance of it. 

If you told her you had lied, would she mind? Would it matter to her? Does it still matter to you?

Eagle’s arms return to yours, unhooking you from Lion, withdrawing your hands and moving them back to Civet. “She’s good. You’re shaking, there, Moth.” 

They wedge you in between their wet bodies with a confidence you don’t understand but deeply need. It doesn’t fan any flames in you: that hearth is cold tonight, but you like the pressure. Eagle isn’t afraid of your skin and stands steady easily, Civet knows to take the lead, setting their face aside yours and breathing deeply until your pace matches theirs. You twist briefly to see Eagle’s hand on Lion’s head, trying not to leave her out.

You want the moment to stop there, to last so long that it causes time to reverse directions. Everyone will unpack their bags, move the containers back to where they were. The sun would rise and things could be like they were for a bit longer, until you were ready to go. 

An iDroid lights up from Civet’s pile of clothes across the room, an incoming call and a signal to hurry up. Lion’s the first to respond, and the three of you disentangle and start to dry off. Civet and Eagle must’ve brought dry fatigues for all of you, but you find yourself getting hung up on the damp towel in your hands. 

“Should we…?” You stop, looking up to see Eagle watching, actively listening to you. Should you take the towels? If you don’t, are they just going to stay here? Until Cipher shows up and… what, destroys Mother Base? Is this towel going to rot in the ocean unless you take it with you, along with how many other thousands of things that you’ve touched and used and seen every day you’ve been here? “Nevermind.”

“You want me to dress you?” Civet says it like a threat, and your face smiles a little. 

Eagle pats Lion’s feet dry, smears them liberally with ointments before the bandages go on. He even gently rolls her socks on for her, and you’re more surprised that she would let him, rather than that he would do it for her. He pushes himself up from the floor with his hands on her knees, as comfortable as if they shared the same body, made of the same stuff. “That’ll have to do you for now. Hurt to stand, much?”

“Running won’t.”

“Yeah, alright, then.”

Civet’s iDroid squawks again and the four of you gather around it, feeling less stupid and more comforted. Eagle unplugs the headset and cranks the speaker, clearing his throat. “How’re you now, Command?”

 _“Oh, good, they’re ready.”_ Ocelot sneers a little, but he’s still hoarse. You think about his toes scraping the deck as Venom pins him up. _“This will be our last contact before we recall you. There are individual tasks I’m assigning you to, but general priorities are safe evac of personnel, asset denial, and direct engagement with Cipher forces. Understood?”_

_“Eagle, you’re responsible for the Battle Gear. R &D will contact you with additional details, but you should be getting it to Outer Heaven, not joyriding.” _

_“Moth, you’ll be at Support. Lion, go to Intel. Be useful.”_

_“Civet, stay at Medical. Based on early radar reports, that may be the first point of contact for Cipher, so you’ll be acting as rear guard for the evacuation.”_

“What about Combat and Base Dev, sir?” The more real the idea of leaving becomes, the more you realize the sheer scale of what’s going to have to happen. “The Animal Platform?”

 _“Why are you asking_ ?” He puts a little emphasis on _you_ , and everyone’s eyes land on yours for a moment, before flicking away. It’s not judgement, just acknowledgement, and more than you want to put on yourself at the moment. You are, after all, a nuclear terrorist. 

_“Enough chattering. Consider yourselves relatively off the leash—Cipher wants this place, so you make them work for it.”_

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kitten squad leaving the showers be like
> 
> Physically and Mentally Refreshed  
> Physically and Mentally Refreshed  
> Physically Refreshed  
> Physical


	8. IT IS FUN TO WALK CARELESSLY IN A DEATH ZONE

**EAGLE**

You whistle, and it bounces around the secret hangar. “Now, why in the sam hill is this  _ here _ , and not at R&D?”

Blue Linsang shrugs, runs her hands through her hair nervously, gestures in barely-restrained frustration and no small amount of panic. “I don’t know! I promise, I didn’t make that decision. Does it matter? We have to get it out of here.”

The Battle Gear is a strange sight, four stubby legs instead of treads or wheels, a big upper portion sitting on top that you imagine swivels around like a tank. The big railgun—you  _ think _ it’s a railgun—is set to the side, which seems bizarrely asymmetric. ZEKE had been the same way, now that you think of it, but two legs instead of four. Do they count as legs if there’s no feet?

You’d grabbed Linsang out of her evacuation duties and despite a lot of reluctant patter, she seems relieved to be out of the froth. There’s something inherently distressing about breaking down your home bit by bit and deciding what gets taken, which you’re happy to avoid by doing this, and not having much of a home to start with. 

“So why aren’t we wormholin’ it?” You put your hands on your hips, wishing for a lit cigarette. "As opposed to regular Fultons, I mean."

“Due to the size. The diameter of the wormhole necessary to fit the Battle Gear through it would be beyond our safe operational levels. There were some tests and it looks like the relative size of the wormhole created some instabilities, in theory, a large enough wormhole could actually destabilize between the entry-exit coordinates, and instead lead to ano—”

“Blue, I’m just gonna agree with you if it gets you in there faster.” You do some folksy pointing to punctuate it, and watch her eyes go saucer-sized.

“Me? No, no, that’s why you’re here, that’s why the Major sent you.” 

“Single person occupancy, right? You drive, I’ll piggyback. You’re safer in however many tons of armor that thing’s got on it.”

“I’m not really trained to drive it, I—”

“But you know how.”

“I’ve moved it a couple of times so we can clean the deck underneath—that  _ doesn’t _ count—”

“That counts. Scoot on in there, fire it up.”

“Eagle…” Linsang shakes her head, muttering to herself as she scrambles up the steps and slides down into the Battle Gear’s cockpit. You can almost hear her complaining as she fires it up, the ignition sequence slowly unfurling the leg joints, the sonic whine of the machine spooling up as it, well, floats. 

You lift a hand to keep the swirling dust kicked up out of your eyes, smelling the distinct scent of burning dust. “Whatever happened to good old fashioned wheels, huh?”

_ “Please don’t make me try to explain Emmerich’s thought processes to you, I can’t and I won’t.” _ Linsang’s voice coming out of the speakers is loud enough to make you think it’s supposed to be used for an intimidation tactic. A red light appears at the top on a little wedge head, like a Walker Gear’s, and you can’t help but feel a little unsettled. 

“How’s visibility in there?”

_ “Bad! It’s all screens. There’s an optical lens in the AI module and some basic rear-facing cameras. I feel like I can’t see anything.” _

“Gotcha.” Jogging over to the hangar door, you hit the release and run back to get the stepladder out of the Gear’s way, not before clambering up and using it to leap off, landing heavy on the top section, near the cockpit hatch.

What must be the AI module spins frantically around, red light buzzing.  _ “What was that? Oh, God, is that you?” _

“Take it easy, Blue.” You pat the little head, getting steady, finding planes and handholds. There’s a socket for a machine gun emplacement you really wish was installed. “Let’s roll. I’ve got your six.”

_ “Can I get a full twelve?”  _ The Battle Gear hums, glides back a meter and scrapes the stepladder into the deck before lurching forward in embarrassment.  _ “Sorry!” _

Rolling out into the night should be louder, there should be more jostling and grinding, but the Battle Gear just hums, whines, rotates easily and in place. Linsang’s ginger with it, and you do wish you could see what this was like at full-tilt, what sound it makes and how strange the motion must feel not touching the ground. 

You coordinate with her easily, maneuvering up to the deployment elevator and heading towards the main level of the platform, flush with the road struts. Should be enough clear air to get it Fultoned, hopefully. 

Rising out of the hangar decks and into the open air puts the whole of Mother Base on the horizon, the pulsing sound and light of klaxons declaring its distress. There are orange fires peppering the platforms and constant cracks of gunfire-- the first of the XOF force is arriving, deciding where they want to focus. 

Combat is getting the worst of it, easy, helicopters pouring heavy fire onto the gun emplacements, and you know the whole platform is giving back as much as it can. The Security measures are good, but they’re meant to repel infiltration, not all-out assault. There are sounds like maybe a jet, above the cloud cover. XOF wants this place more or less intact, you figure, otherwise they’d be carpet bombing it. 

Maybe they want the Boss back, or they figure the whole place is loaded with gear like the parasite suit. When it comes down to it, you couldn’t really say what XOF wanted with the base, with the Boss. Doesn’t matter in the long run. 

_ “Eagle, do you have the Fultons ready?” _

Doesn’t matter in the long run. You roll that around your mouth, test the shape with your tongue. “You ever stole a car, Blue?”

_ “Oh, no. Please. We have orders from the Major, Eagle, I’m just—” _

“I’m ranking officer here, you let me worry about the Major.” That’s probably a lie, but it’ll make Blue feel better. “Look at Combat.”

The AI module swings around in the wrong direction before pivoting around to look where you are, and Linsang’s protests trail off. You don’t need to goad her. She’s a Diamond Dog, just like you were MSF, she’ll get there on her own.

_ “Can we help them?”  _ Even magnified, Linsang is quiet, humbled by the lines of fire in the night, in the implication of Combat swarmed and fighting to the end. 

“You  _ do _ have a railgun.” 

_ “Really loving your confidence, but I’m not that good of a shot.” _

“Blue, this thing was made for a man with one eye and brain damage, there is a targeting system, you just gotta find it.” You narrow your eyes against the breeze, wishing you had binoculars. 

_ “Not entirely sure you should talk about the Boss that way,” _ Linsang muses, but you know it’s idle. She’s looking, thinking hard. Mechanisms deep within the Battle Gear click, engage and you watch the railgun’s barrel start to move. Ponderous and deliberate.

“There you go.” You pat the AI module head for lack of anything else to do. “Think you could get one of those XOF choppers?”

_ “I can’t, but the Battle Gear might be able to.” _ Tiny micro adjustments, a million little synthetic synapses firing, adjusting, zeroing in. 

“Should I plug my ears?” You ask, right before the railgun fires, the sound like an electric whip swinging through the air and snapping at the apex. The Battle Gear shudders but doesn’t buck in recoil. Something seems to draw a straight streak across your vision, one of the black XOF choppers already in flames, pieces spiraling white hot into the night. 

_ “Oh, God, I didn’t think--?” _

It’s a hollow victory. Something inside you feels like it’s going through the motions of losing the first Mother Base, just slower and with less intensity. But it feels good to see those fiery shreds plunging into the sea.

There’s the sound of a lock turning from inside and Linsang opens the hatch, looking drawn, nervous. She’s R&D, and it occurs to you maybe she’s never killed anyone before. There are kids like that, in Diamond Dogs. You feel old. 

“Eagle,” she says, hair thrown into her eyes by the breeze, smelling of smoke more than the ocean. “I-- um.”

Someone you were or knew once would kick her back down that hatch to shut up and fire the railgun again, but that thought sits before you like an object on a table. Linsang stares at the carnage over the Combat platform, the wreckage a bright point, and you don't see her enjoying it. If anything, she looks sick and scared, and very young.

You take her face in your hands, force her to stop looking. “Thanks for gettin’ her warmed up for me. You did a good job, Blue.”

“I don’t want to be a coward, but, I--I don’t know. I, just, I--”

“I was thinkin’, you’re a Diamond Dog. Just like MSF, like I used to be. But it’s not the same. Diamond Dog’s’ve got room for you to be… whatever. An R&D geek. You don’t have to be a stone cold killer, too. That’s the difference, and I’m glad it’s not the same.” You pat her cheek, then reach down to pick her up bodily out of the Battle Gear, like a little kid.

Blue’s scrubbing her face and still crying anyway, and you stay knelt beside her, handing over your wormhole Fulton. “Go on and get wherever it is we’re going. Tell the first XO you see that shitty old Weeping Eagle kicked you in a wormhole and stole the Battle Gear to blow shit up and play Freebird real loud.”

She laughs, all choked up with snot and shaking. “Are you really…?”

“Oh, yeah. XOF’s gonna know I’m coming and it still won’t save’em. Okay?”

Blue Linsang nods. “Okay.”

You see her off before you drop down into the Battle Gear, just in time. Some of the XOF choppers have reoriented in search of the railgun, and it looks like the Gear needs to move to help build up charge for the next one. The controls are dead simple, the targeting even more so, which is good because it takes you a minute to figure out the audio system. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**MOTH**

  
  


You’re alone, deep in the base, and the brig is empty except for you and the man still locked in a cell. 

He has no age and no nose, and he doesn’t avoid your gaze, the two of you looking at each other with a naked, dull interest. Animals in the same zoo.

“If I let you out,” You start, your voice sounding too calm. “Are you going to kill our men?”

“No.”

You have no promise he’s telling the truth. No one will tell you the specifics, but he is likely responsible for killing a few Diamond Dogs, planting explosives in the soft parts of Mother Base that will be hard to find. Even if you found most of them, there would never be any way to be sure all of them were gone. You can clearly picture the torment this would cause Kaz. If you were staying. If any of you were staying. 

The man is colorless and drab, the only remarkable sign of life a faded red bandana under hair the color of dishwater, over skin a deep silver in the cold light. 

The life awaiting him as a prisoner is gruesome and bleak but you have no doubt the thought of it doesn’t bother him. He has an honest blankness, an acceptance of the future and the fearlessness of a soul already spoken for. You hadn’t pictured people beyond Diamond Dogs to have that kind of devotion. He has to have something. Someone.

You’re already ten for ten on the treason scale, so you hotwire the door pad, tug it open past stiff hinges. There’s no point in staying to watch him leave other than a voyeur’s desire to see yourself in another person, so you leave first. It feels good—Civet wouldn’t have done that. Ocelot wouldn’t have let a prize go, and Kaz…

_ Moth let him go. _ You see your shape defined a little more by the choice. 

XOF forces have mostly finished with the empty Support struts by now—papers flutter past and into the darkness, the red aux lights pulsing slowly. Almost invisible but for the sound of it, a jet makes a low pass overhead and you watch disbelieving as it sheds a line of tracer rounds at you, hot and bright and enormously loud. 

The wind of them passing you by harmlessly knocks you back, only for the force of them hitting another deck blowing you forward, palms leaving skin all over the tarmac. The jet shears off into the night and you roll onto your stomach, willing your limbs to push you up, get you moving. Continue. 

Your head lifts first, eyes locking onto the roof of nearby barracks. Silhouetted by a fire, you see the modest, grinded-smooth scrap metal of the Mbele kids’ playground. The carefully polished weld joints of the elephant slide stand out in your memory. The swing set’s leather seats are burned away, only chains dangling in the firelight. You think about a tennis ball in your hand. Sun in your eyes. 

The longing for the restraint of the gas mask bubbles up almost outside of you—something to hide in, to give you a reason why you can’t scream or cry. You heave in a long, scraping breath that’s mostly smoke and tears, getting up easily, inevitably. 

Behind you on the road leading back to Command, you see a black helicopter resolve out of the cloudy night, orange light flickering on the blades and landing gear. It hovers and disgorges XOF, faceless men and women with lives and ambitions and dreams and families, dark mirrors of your people. 

There’s a rattling across the deck that doesn’t frighten you. Instead, you reach down just before the semi-auto shotgun hits your ankles, moving from nowhere like it had been magnetized to you. Maybe it’s a hallucination, but there are shells still clipped to the carry strap, and you don’t have to look down as you quad load it, hearing and feeling it in your bones, the motion almost comforting in how familiar it is. 

They should see you coming, they should  _ hear _ you, your every exhale is a release of pressurized gas, but they don’t. You raise the shotgun and brace the stock against your shoulder, moving fast and low through the dark, eyes wide.

The combat armor of the first XOF soldier stops the shotgun blast from opening a hole straight through him, but fire plumes out spontaneously, the flames almost flapping like wings, the gush of it propelling him up and into the chopper blades. There’s a noise you’ll never forget and a brief dark rain, but all the motion goes through the helicopter as it thrashes in its own momentum, not even the cockpit glass reaching you as it plows into the deck, errant rotor blades tearing through the XOF soldiers like a lawnmower. 

You think briefly of the silent, beautiful saboteur, and how close you had been to him in that moment, how attainable that calm had seemed. There is still so much inside you still burning, still churning in a cycle of fission. 

The gas from the chopper ignites and the heat dries the tears and blood on your face, and you keep moving forward to the surviving XOF men, licks of flame fluttering in the air around you like hopeless insects. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


**LION**

There’s a big, oblong shape that can be seen mainly by the way the water breaks over it, a dark shape in darkness. Light runnels off it instead of globbing and fracturing like it does on the ocean water, so the shape can be seen, the way it is too large to be an animal, too smooth and perfect. It banks slow around the platforms, only carefully threading the needle between struts when necessary, the patience and silence of an animal, but it is too large and too smooth and too perfect. 

The Intel Platform is seeding itself with explosives. There isn’t time enough to shred documents, fire may take too long. There are many ways in the world to be found guilty of something, with numbers bigger or smaller than they should be. It would be best to sink it to the bottom of the ocean.

> Screaming Wallaby is the only face recognized here. Listen, we’re fine. It was nice of the Major to send you, but we have things covered. 
> 
> There’s a submarine. 
> 
> What?
> 
> It’s in the water.
> 
> I—well, okay, yeah, that’s—have you told the Major? A sub? Christ, a  _ submarine?  _
> 
> Where’s a car you aren’t using? 
> 
> What? What? 
> 
> Where is a car you aren’t using? Screaming Wallaby points to a jeep. 

There is a grim and bitter enjoyment in the people on the Intel platform, the careful and sometimes not careful destruction of all this work, of weeding out what needs to be taken away and saved. 

The jeep has the usual assortment of tools. A jug of extra petrol, the road flares, the fire axe found near the fire extinguisher are collected and come to wait by the edge of the platform.

The shape in the water can be watched for, although it may not need to rest as an animal does. The tower or the thing that people climb out of, it breaks the surface eventually between two struts—it’s a good location to get into the heart of the Intel platform, through the emergency exits and the life rafts lining the underside of the platform. There are also metal stairs within the platform to be taken to those lower levels. 

Not too far from one of these ledges of grating and rails, there are ropes standing taut in the air, lines that go all the way down to the water. Above, there are grappling hooks hanging onto pipes and supports like claws.

Pulling on the rope with the head of the axe does not make it move much: there is resistance, there are men on the ropes. Parts of their kit glint in the light. No one has taped them down and made them quiet. 

Unscrewing the fuel jug and stretching out over the railing, it is possible to let it chug out, run down the rope, splattering around. It can be wedged near the railing to let it finish pouring, while road flares are lit, then held to the rope. The flare is very red and lights up the underside of the platform, flickering, and the ropes begin to creak and strain, the weight on them beginning to make noise as the fire takes root. The observation that the weight is men was considered and dismissed: they are not supposed to be here.

Boots can be set aside, along with disgusting socks muggy with antiseptic and wound fluid. The boots may be too heavy, and salt water is known to be good for injuries. 

The axe must be controlled and straight against the body after the jump from the railing, into the dark air and dark space before the dark water. For a moment there is a man burning on the line in the dark space, slapping at his fire and trapped between other twisting bodies. 

Hitting the water shakes everything, shorthand for terrible pain. Salt water has to be blinked away, the axe’s weight carefully managed in the water. The shape is here now, rough-smooth metal hide that is easy to grip. The submarine bobs slowly, balance comes back after the shock of the dive. 

The hatch is still open, strong red light emitting from inside and a man comes up to investigate what must be going on through the radio. The men are still burning above, the first fallen screaming and bright into the water, and it can only be observed in silence. The man that has come out of the hatch does not move first or enough when the axe handle is brought across his throat with the force to lift him out of the hatch, and he is killed. 

On the man’s body there is a gun and a lighter that has something painted or written on it. That part is not significant, but the lighter can be used to set the next road flare spitting smoke and light. The man’s body slides into the ocean and the flare is dropped down the hatch and into the submarine, gushing smoke. The axe and gun follow.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**CIVET**

  
  


The Med platform is barren by the time you get there, not in the way of early hours but in genuine abandon, and your skin crawls. The auxiliary lights pulse sluggishly, and the sound of the Combat platform’s last hurrah seems distant, echoing across the sea. Just a matter of time before it spreads to the others.

Canary runs—ran— more evac drills than any other team lead, so you shouldn’t be surprised that your room sweeps turn up nothing: empty beds with the blankets tossed aside, bare cabinets and spaces in rooms obviously lacking equipment. 

You find him on a square of rooftop not looking out at anything but the dark ocean, and you crouch down beside him. “Anything left, Canary?”

“People say we’re going to Africa,” he replies, dull with exhaustion. “I’ve just been putting them in the wormholes, I don’t even know where they go.”

There’s an explosion from another platform that knocks out the alarm klaxons there, turns the soundscape uneven. You wish you were out there—this quiet stuff isn’t your forte. Moth knows Canary, would know what to say to him now. 

“Is this what it was like with the first Mother Base?” you ask, sensing Canary needs to talk and not knowing where to start but the most obvious point. 

“No,” Canary says, finally, sweat or tears tracking clean down his face. “I wasn’t there, which is why I’m here. We didn’t have a chance, so this—this is actually about as well as it could go, in my opinion.”

There’s something in the way his eyes won’t leave the horizon that makes you afraid, and you sit down next to him. Specifically within grabbing distance. Canary’s not a lightweight, but he’s no Rhino.

“You got a cigarette handy, Civet?”

“No.”

“Yeah, you wouldn’t.” He sighs, lays down flat with his back against the roof. Looking up, you see an orange glow humming on the low cloud cover, no sign of the sky. “Jesus, I’m tired.”

“This doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you do twice in your life.”

“Guess I’m just lucky.” Canary closes his eyes, and you feel privileged and embarrassed to see him like this. All out of it and sad, if that’s what the word for this is. 

“I don’t know how to help you,” you admit, uneasy. Unhappy. “Or make you feel better.”

“That’s not your job.”

“I don’t think I’d be good at it anyway.” Looking at your hands, you think of Moth.  _ Ask me later _ . “Got any tips?”

“Morphine.”

“C’mon, Canary.”

Another, far off explosion, the scrape and rumble of a jet very low through the air. You hate not watching, not being more present for the battle, making it seems so out of your control. Like a thunderstorm over the next town.

“I need all my own wisdom, Civet,” Canary grunts as he rolls over, puts his feet underneath him and gets up slowly. The perennial white of his doctor’s coat is mostly gray. “Go get your own. Where’s the Boss sending us?”

“Outer Heaven.” It feels exotic to say it aloud. Mysterious. “It’s in South Africa, somewhere. Galzburg?”

“On land?” He makes a face. “Alright. Why not?”

A jet makes another pass, and your gut lurches. “Yeah, time to go. You got a wormhole?”

He pats his pockets. “Think I used my last.”

“I’ve got you.” It’s your last one, actually, the others distributed like life jackets to Diamond Dogs you had met fleeing the Med platform on your way here. The little indicator light beeps good to go, and you hand it to Canary. The activation of it might as well be a signal flare to the jet you keep hearing, and Canary finally shows some life, looking surprised when you kick him through the wormhole and dive off the low rooftop towards the edge.

You wait and cling to a vent, the jet drops ordnance on the rest of the Med platform, not falling far enough to whistle. The wind of the planes passing dries the sweat on your face and you pull yourself back up, sprinting for cover. 

As soon as you’ve oriented back towards the long, entirely coverless run to Command, you see your only jeep currently smeared across the deck and wholly on fire. The XOF plane comes in again, this time focusing on the helipad, the connection strut between the roadway and the first main Med platform, the shock of it shaking the deck under your feet. It’s puncturing through, white-hot steel beams stretched like connective tissue between the platform and the roadway. 

The jet’s engines burn hot as it peels away toward Command, and you see the wings dip in a banking turn, only to keep turning, keep rolling, and you watch it clip the side of a tower on the Intel platform, slamming into the matte dark of the sea. 

If you had to guess, it’d be Quiet. You had heard a presumably fake rumor she could shoot jets, and you know she’s on Command, along with the Boss. All the stops being pulled out. 

You hear the helicopter before you see it, coming up from below the level of the platform and you throw an arm up, hearing one of Pequod’s tapes and not having anywhere to run if it isn’t him.

The mounted light swings into your face briefly and your lip curls, the chopper hovering closer, struts not even barely brushing the platform. Bizarrely, Ocelot of all people hangs out the side, hand extended. 

You run, jump, Pequod peeling away even before your boots hit the deck. Ocelot’s grip stays on your forearm, tight and red, and you take full advantage of being this close. He looks like shit. You grip him back just as hard, shoving into his personal space.

“Major!” You almost yell it into his face and his eyes are still locked on Mother Base below. “You look like shit.”

“Civet,” Ocelot says, not looking at you because he doesn’t have to. “You’ve grown too big for the tank.”

Had you been expecting this? What’s he saying? You don’t recoil, but you don’t let yourself reply. 

“I’ve got business abroad, and I want someone competent watching my back.” The drawl kicks in heavier and his eyes are lit up by a distant fire, arc welding blue. “Care to join me?”

Your skin crawls, hot and cold all at once. This has something to do with Snake, and you know it. That’s the only thing that could ever make Ocelot leave his post, really. Doesn’t mean you’d end up with Snake. Doesn’t mean you couldn’t come home after whatever it was is done. 

“Even got the Boss’s go-ahead,” Ocelot says, almost dreamily. “If you’re worried about hurting his feelings. Of course, you want to stay here and play house, I understand.”

It’s your turn to look down at Mother Base. The fires are spreading. You see for a moment what looks like a tank or something rolling along one of the platforms, barrel white hot and a guitar solo wailing out of the speakers. Gotta be yours, XOF doesn’t have the sense of humor. 

In your heart, you know you should refuse, that your love for Mother Base should stir you to want to stay, to rebuild whatever is left, wherever it’s all going. You should tell him you aren’t interested in abandoning your family, that if Snake couldn’t lure you away then he’s got no chance. 

Ocelot’s still looking at you, when you turn back to him. The wind shifts briefly and you smell the cordite, the sweat. 

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're almost there!


	9. MOTH

**MOTH**

  
  
  


**YOUR MODERN FACE SCANS THE SURPRISE ENDING**

  
  
  
  


You find the Boss on accident. There’s nothing you can say or articulate to him about how you’d gotten to Command, just a shotgun with no more shells and the sensation of fire, your skin tight and dry from the heat. Quiet passes by like an enormous insect, sometimes fluttering or buzzing, always nearby. It’s good she’s here for the Boss. You sit dumbly on the platform and follow them onto the helicopter when it arrives. 

Mother Base is all orange, lit up by fires, spotlights. There was an enormous explosion earlier at Combat, the kind that was bright for too long and sent twisting metal steaming into the sea, shrieking as the bridge between platforms twisted, snapped and collapsed. The view expands and then contracts as you move away from it, and fear swirls inside you at the thought that you’re leaving, this is it. You aren’t ready. 

But the Boss has you set down on the Animal Platform. Quiet disappears into the high strutwork of the bird enclosure, present only as a roving green dot now and again. Venom stays on the radio and you cast around for anything to keep busy with, but the platform is silent. The animals have all gone, and you don’t know where.

Pequod arrives, no music playing, and you’re hiding behind a sign on the railing even before you see Ocelot disembark, Civet with him. Relief makes you shake. Civet.

You can’t make out their expression, and they aren’t speaking. Ocelot exchanges a few words with the Boss, and they stand together in silence, watching a final chopper arrive. By all rights you should be there with them, and a sharp loneliness fishhooks into your guts. It would be as easy as standing and walking over to them, but you can’t. 

Turns out to be for the best. The final helicopter is Kaz. Kaz gets out of the chopper, the rotors spinning down and the wind changing direction so that you can hear him. And you don’t want to. The worst feeling you’ve had in a long time grows and expands inside you, dread so palpable you want to vomit. Your heart pounds and you think you might go crazy or die. You don’t want to hear this. 

“Boss…” You flinch at how much Kaz hurts, how you can hear it so nakedly. “There’s still time. If we deploy Combat units from other FOBs—”

“XOF has it, Miller, it’s too late.” Ocelot doesn’t sound sad.

“You would say that. Are you happy? You got what he wanted. We’re going.”

“Kaz—”

“Did you let that bastard walk in here to plant those bombs? Kill our men? Did he tell you to? Have to make it convincing, of course, whatever it takes, _WHATEVER_ it costs, if we wouldn’t go _WHERE HE WANTED_ —” There’s a scraping and lunging, the sound of the Boss’s body colliding with Kaz’s. 

“Kaz!”

“ _YOU_ —! YOU DIDN’T EVEN _TRY!_ ” Not coordinated enough to be a slap. But he still hit the Boss. You can tell. “You let him do this to us. We could’ve fought. We should’ve died here rather than run.”

“No place is worth the lives of our men. It would’ve been a slaughter, even if we won.”

“ _I BUILT THIS!_ I GAVE _EVERYTHING_ , TO BUILD THIS!” 

Ocelot heaves a sigh. "Well, I'd call this settled, Boss. Men and materiel are waiting for you at Outer Heaven. If you’ll excuse me.” The activation hum of an iDroid, the adjustment of a Fulton wormhole device. “Civet.”

“Yes, sir.”

Your heart stops, lungs seizing. Civet’s going with him? For how long? Why? Where? Why hadn’t they told you, why hadn’t they found a way to tell you? Civet can’t go, you’ll need their help. You need _them_. You had already counted that they would be there, with you--

But there’s the wormhole crackle and hiss, the opening of the aperture and then the closing of it, and Kaz hits the Boss a few more times, until he’s let go. You can hear him stumping away, farther, closer to the edge of the platform. 

The sirens from Mother Base finally shut off. They don’t talk, no one talks, but you hear the sound of metal straining and breaking for so long that it can only be a platform plunging into the sea. Your nails and fingers thread through your hair, find your scalp, dig in. 

“I can’t do this again.” Kaz sounds like he wants to laugh or cry but can’t even force either. “I _won’t_ do this again.”

“I understand.”

“I don’t think you do.”

“Can we part as friends?”

“Jesus, Venom.” 

You plug your ears and screw your eyes shut, the churning of a helicopter’s rotors making it through anyway, and you bite your tongue, the insides of your cheeks so you don’t scream to block it out. It crescendoes and then it fades, and you curl into a tight of a ball as you can manage and wish the platform would sink into the sea. Take you with it. You don’t want this anymore. You don’t want anything. 

“Moth.” The Boss peels your fingers out of your scalp, unfolds your limbs, exposes your wet face to the breeze. He doesn’t resolve into anything meaningful, you’re crying too hard. Just blurs and glints of equipment. The click of a metal prosthetic. 

This is bizarre. The Boss has a connection to Civet, not to you. He never saved you like he did Civet. Your clawed hands curl into fists and his grip on your wrists keeps you from hitting him, hitting yourself. 

“He left,” you say, your own voice unrecognizable. “He _LEFT!”_ You scream it at him, as loud and as wordless as you can, knowing the platform is empty. There are no animals left to scare. It’s his fault. If he were a better Boss, none of this would’ve happened. You would still have a home, a face, Civet would be here, you wouldn’t have-- have done those things--

You want to go berserk and beat the Boss to death with your fists, bite him until he bleeds or until he has to kill you to stop you, and it’s so close. You can feel it, the last of you barely holding on. You want to kill and die so badly in equal amounts, just to prove you could do something back to the world that will not stop doing things to you. 

“Are you leaving, too?” Venom asks, standing and hauling you up too. Are you broken? Are you useless? He says it very harshly, and you want to spit at him and say yes, and then lose your mind completely out of spite. 

Your teeth hurt from being clenched together so hard, and you stomp on his boot, kick at his shin and knee with all of your strength, which isn’t much anymore. You can hear it in his voice, you can hear all of it in his voice. 

_having personal feelings about your comrades_

_YOU’RE CRYING_

_is one of the worst sins_

_HE CAN MAKE YOU DO ANYTHING HE WANTS_

_you can commit_

_I CAN’T CARRY YOU_

_“NO!”_ You shriek it at him, impaled on that one eye and the darkness next to it and so deeply tired of being in pain. “I’m _NOT!_ ”

Brass Moth. Soft metal, soft insect. Civet might like you but you know they held you in contempt for being weak. Eagle making them go through the motions of caring for you because you look fragile. Lion’s distant gaze, not even registering. You weren’t the best or the strongest or the meanest or the most. You were the nice one. The small thing. The insect. Soft. 

“Let _GO!_ ” You throw your whole body into yanking away from Venom, and he does. 

Stumbling back, you look at him clearly, Mother Base burning behind him, and it all wells up, pours out in tears and a loud voice that’s never come out of you before. 

“I am not _leaving_. Before I-- before I was like this, I was yours, because you saw something in me. Before I was Moth, I was a Diamond Dog, and I am not _leaving_ the Diamond Dogs like this. I’ll do it, I’ll make it right, I’ll _fix_ it,” Your finger keeps stabbing at Venom, and you’re crying enough that the tears just fall out of the way, keeping your view of him clear. “I will tell you when I’m done. Don’t you _ever_ speak to me that way again.”

You don’t know if that’s for Venom, but the words have to come out. You have to hear them, you need someone else to hear them, you need it to be real. 

He stands there for a moment. Big Boss, alone. He’s lost everything that you have, and eventually you can hear the part of yourself that’s a better person wailing to be kind, to remember who he is and have sympathy, think about him. Think about what he’s given up and lost for you. _Plant your roots in me,_ the legend handled so often by every Diamond Dog that it’s become a prayer. 

Venom extends his hand to you, and you seize it, standing by his side and facing the long view of darkness, Mother Base glowing at the center of it. XOF will spread soon and you’ll have to go, but you want to watch as long as you can. 

Your hand shakes with the force of your grip on his. You want it to hurt. You want him to remember this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For like four fics I'm all "now _this_ is the fic where Moth has it the roughest," but it just keeps happening. 
> 
> It's so strange to think this series has been going on for so long. By my nature and the way of life progressing, I can sometimes be, uh, how to say, not the best about finishing projects. So every time I get through a chunk of this story, I get all sappy and broken up about how cool it is to share things with others on the internet, and the inherent human fascination with storytelling. 
> 
> Anyways! Thank you so much, as always, for reading! The next arc is already underway, and the project codename?
> 
> 'REVENGE ROADTRIP'
> 
> P.S. [Eagle's okay! ... Somehow.](https://twitter.com/gameplanpng/status/1233545977870548993?s=20)

**Author's Note:**

> I've got a [twitter presence](https://twitter.com/gameplanpng) and [tumblr](https://coyotefather.tumblr.com/) if you're into that sorta thing


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